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The

Case for
India

Will Durant

Strand Book Stall, Mumbai

This limited edition is published by
Strand Book Stall, December 2007

Strand Book Stall
15-C, "Dhannur"

Sir P. M. Road
Fort

Mumbai 400 001

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Copyright © 2007, Strand Book Stall

Printed at Mouj Printing Bureau, Khatau Wadi, Girgaum,
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any
information storage or retrieval system, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.

To

John Haynes Holmies
and

Jabez T. Sunderland,

The Bravest Friends of India in America.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Introduction 9

A Note to the Reader 10

CHAPTER I
FOR INDIA

I. Personal 1

II. A Perspective of India 3

III. The Rape of a Continent 5

IV. The Caste System in India 12

V. Economic Destruction 22

VI. Social Destruction 31

VII. The Triumph of Death 35

CHAPTER II
GANDHI

I. Portrait 40

II. Preparation 44

III. Revolution by Peace 48

IV. Christ Meets John Bull 56

V. The Religion of Gandhi 59

VI. Gandhi's Social Philosophy 67

VII. Criticism .....73

VIII. An Estimate 80

INTRODUCTION

IX

viii THE CASE FOR INDIA

CHAPTER III
THE REVOLUTION

I. Origin , 84

II. A Stroke of Politics 86

III. A Whiff of Grapeshot 93

IV. The Revolt of 1921 96

V. Between Revolutions 100

VI. The Simon Commission 102

VII. 1930......... 105

CHAPTER IV

THE CASE FOR ENGLAND

I. England Speaks 116

1. The Nietzschean Defense 119

2. British Contributions to India 125

3. The Key to the White Man's Power 127

II. India Answers 127

1. Morals in India 127

2. The Decay of Caste 132

3. Greek Gifts... 135

CONCLUSION

WITH MALICE TOWARDS NONE 144

Notes 150

INTRODUCTION

Sometime in the earlyl960s I had the good fortune of
meeting the greatest historian of civilization of all time. Will
Durant. Over lunch, I learned from the author that he had
written a book called "The Case for India". In spite of knowing
of its contents, in brief, from the author himself, over the years
I could not lay my hands on a single copy.

I owe my immense gratitude to Mohandas Pai of Infosvs
who recently gave a photocopy of "The Case for India" to my
daughter Vidya Virkar, who in turn passed it on to me. Mohan's
keen interest in India's heritage had led him to this remarkable
work.

Will Durant has made an in-depth study of Indian
Civilization which he has gone on to declare as one of the most
ancient and the greatest civilization that mankind has ever
known. Such a cogent analysis could only have been made by a
historian of Will Durant's stature.

In publishing this limited edition of "The Case for India",
we are hoping to put our nation and civilization in their proper
frame of reference. Our endeavour goes far beyond the concept
of business, it is intended to be a contribution towards the
revelation and dissemination of historic truth, as Will Durant
meant it to be.

T N Shanbhag
Founder,
Strand Book Stall

X

THE CASE FOR INDIA

A NOTE TO THE READER

I went to India to help myself visualize a people whose cultural
history I had been studying for The Story of Civilization. I did not
expect to be attracted by the Hindus , or that I should be swept into a
passionate interest in Indian politics. I merely hoped to add a little to
my material, to look with my own eyes upon certain works of art ,
and then to return to my historical studies, forgetting this contem-
porary world ,

But I saw such things in India as made me feel that study and
writing were frivolous things in the presence of a people-one-fifth of
the human race-suffering poverty and oppression bitterer than any
to be found elsewhere on the earth. I was horrified. I had not thought
it possible that any government could allow its subjects to sink to
such misery.

1 came away resolved to study living India as well as the India
with the brilliant past; to learn more of this unique Revolution that
fought with suffering accepted but never returned; to read the Gan-
dhi of today as well as the Buddha of long ago. And the more 1 read
the more I was filled with astonishment and indignation at the ap-
parently conscious and deliberate bleeding of India by England
throughout a hundred and fifty years. I began to feel that I had come
upon the greatest crime in all history.

And so I ask the reader's permission to abandon for a while my
researches into the past, so that I may stand up and say my word for
India. I know how weak words mv <« me face oi guns and mood, how

A NOTE TO THE READER

XI

irrelevant mere truth and decency appear beside the might of expires
and gold. But if even one Hindi, fighting for freedom far off there on
the other side of the globe, shall hear this call of mine and be a trifle
comforted, then these months of work on this little book will seem
sweet to me. For I know of nothing in the world that I would rather
do today than to be of help to India.

October 1, 1930.

Will Durant

Note ; This book has been written without the knowledge or
co-operation, in any form, of any Hindu, or of any person acting
for India.

CHAPTER ONE

FOR INDIA

I. Personal

I wish to speak, in this chapter, with unaccustomed
partiality and passion. I am poorly qualified to write of India:
I have merely crossed it twice between east and west, and once
from north to south, and seen hardly a dozen of its cities. And
though I have prepared myself with the careful study of a
hundred volumes, this has all the more convinced me that my
knowledge is trifling and fragmentary in the face of a
civilization five thousand years old, endlessly rich in
philosophy, literature, religion and art, and infinitely
appealing in its ruined grandeur and its weaponless struggle
for liberty. If I write at all it is not only because I feel deeply
about India, but because life cannot wait till knowledge is
complete. One must speak out, and take sides before the fight
is over.

I have seen a great people starving to death before my
eyes, and I am convinced that this exhaustion and starvation
are due not, as their beneficiaries claim, to over-population
and superstition, but to the most sordid and criminal
exploitation of one nation by another in all recorded history.
I propose to show that England has year by year been bleeding
India to the point of death, and that self-government of India
by the Hindus could not, within any reasonable probability,
have worse results than the present form of alien domination.
I shall limit myself in this chapter to presenting the case for

1

2

THE CASE FOR INDIA

India, knowing that the case against her has been stated ail
too well in what may be long remembered as the unfairest
book ever written. Nevertheless, lest I should merely repeat
and reverse that crime, I shall in a later chapter outline the case
for England in India as strongly as I can.

In the London Daily Herald of October 17, 1927, Ramsay
MacDonald, now Prime Minister of England, declared that
further so-called "tutelage" of India for self-rule was useless;
she should have self-government at once. He affirmed that
India was already fit for self-government, and that the only
training she required was that of her own experience in liberty.
Shortly before its recent coming to power, the Labor Party of
Great Britain officially declared : "We believe that the time has
come when our brothers in all parts of India are capable (not
will be some time but are now) of controlling their own affairs
equally along with South Africa and other British Dominions;
and we hereby pledge ourselves to assist in every way possible
to bring about this much desired reform.

I have the honor to agree with the British Government; I
argue only for Elome Rule. I speak not as an American only,
but as a member of the family of the English-speaking peoples;
I rest my case above all on the evidence of Englishmen, I write,
I think, in harmony with the fine traditions of Englis a
liberalism from Burke and Sheridan and Fox to Bertrand
Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and Bernard Shaw. I like and
honor Englishmen, but I am not fond of the British; the English
are the best gentlemen on earth, the British are the worst of
all imperialists. The English gave the world liberty, and the
British are destroying it. I confess that I am prejudiced m
favour of liberty.

* Reference notes will be found beginning on page 150

FOR INDIA

3

II. A Perspective of India

Let us remember, first, that India is not a little island, nor
a continent sparsely inhabited by savages, but a vast territory
containing 3,20,000,- 000 souls— three times as many as in the
United States, more than in North and South America
combined, more than in all Europe, west of Russia, combined;
all in all, one-fifth of the world's population. Let us remember,
further, that in the northern and more important half of India
the people are predominantly of the same race as the Greeks,
the Romans, and ourselves — i.e., "Indo-Europeans" or
"Aryans" ; that though their skin has been browned by the
tireless sun, their features resemble ours, and are in general
more regular and refined than those of the average European
; that India was the mother-land of our race, and Sanskrit the
mother of Europe's languages; that she was the mother of our
philosophy, mother, through Arabs, of much of our
mathematics, mother, through Buddha, of the ideals embodied
in Christianity, mother, through the village community, of self-
government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways
the mother of us all.’ 1 ’

Let us remember, also, in order that we may see the
problem in perspective, the age and variety of India's
civilization. Recent excavations at Mohenjo Daru have
revealed a civilization 3500 B.C. with great cities and
industries, comfortable homes, and luxuries ranging from
bathrooms to statuary and jewelry; "all betokening a social
condition .... superior to that prevailing in contemporary
Babylonia and Egypt." 3 When Alexander the Great invaded

* The first volume of the author's t>tory of Civilization will
substantiate this in detail.

4

THE CASE FOR INDIA

FOR INDIA

5

India in 326 B.C., his historian, Megasthenes, recorded his
amazement at finding on the Indus a people quite as civilized
and artistic as the Greeks, who were then at the height of their
curve. 4

At no time in history has India been without civilization :
from the days of Buddha, in the fifth century, who is to the
East what Christ is to the West ; through the time when Asoka,
the most humane of emperors, preached the gentle creed of
Buddha from pillars and monuments everywhere ; down to
the sixteenth century, when culture, wealth and art flourished
at Vijayanagar in the south, and a still higher culture, and still
greater wealth and art, flourished under Akbar in the north.
It was to reach this India of fabulous riches that Columbus
sailed the seas. The civilization that was destroyed by British
guns had lasted for fifteen centuries, producing saints from
Buddha to Ramakrishna and Gandhi ; philosophy from the
Vedas to Schopenhauer and Bergson, Thopea and Keyserling,
who take their lead and acknowledge their derivation from
India (India, say Keyserling, "has produced the profoundest
metaphysics that we know of."; and he speaks of "the absolute
superiority of India over the West I philosophy" 5 ); poetry from
the Mahabharata containing the Bhagavad-Gita, "perhaps the
most beautiful work of the literature of the world," down to
Sarojini Naidu, greatest of living women poets, and
Rabindranath Tagore, who, writing local dialect in a subject
land, has made himself the most famous poet of our time. And
how shall we rank a civilization that created the unique and
gigantic temples of Ellora, Madura and Angkor and the perfect
artistry of Delhi, Agra and the Taj Mahal — that indescribable
lyric in stone?

This, evidently, was not a minor civilization produced by

an inferior people. It ranks with the highest civilizations of
history, and some, like Keyserling, would place it at the head
and summit of all. When, in 1803, the invading British
besieged the Fort at Agra, and their cannon struck near the
beautiful Khass Mahal, or Hall of Private Audience, the
Hindus surrendered at once lest one of the most perfect
creations of the human hand should be ruined like Rheims.
Who then were the civilized? The British conquest of India was
the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading
company utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art
and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a
country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and
murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career
of illegal and "legal" plunder which has now gone on
ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy-three years, and goes
on at this moment while in our secure comfort we write and
read.

Ill . The Rape of a Continent

When the British came, India was politically weak, and
economically prosperous. The Mogul dynasty, which had so
stimulated art, science and literature in India, came to the
usual fate of monarchies in 1658, when Shah Jehan, builder
of the Taj Mahal, was succeeded by his fanatical son,
Aurangzeb. For almost fifty years this Puritanic emperor
misgoverned India; when he died his realm fell to pieces, and
petty princes set up their rule in numberless divided and
"sovereign" states. It was a simple matter for a group of
English buccaneers, armed with the latest European artillery
and morals, to defeat the bows and arrows, the elephants and

6

THE CASE FOR INDIA

FOR INDIA

7

primitive musketry of the rajahs, and bring one Hindu
province after another under the control of the British East
India Company.

Those who have seen the unspeakable poverty and
physiological weakness of the Hindus to-day will hardly
believe that it was the wealth of eighteenth century India
which attracted the commercial pirates of England and France.
'This wealth/' says Sunderland,

was created by the Hindus' vast and varied
industries. Nearly every kind of manufacture or
product known to the civilized world-nearly every
kind of creation of Man's brain and hand, existing
anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty-
had long, long been produced in India. India was a far
greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any
in Europe or than any other in Asia. Her textile goods-
the fine products of her looms, in cotton, wool, linen
and silk-were famous over the civilized world; so
were her exquisite jewelry and her precious stones cut
in every lovely form; so were her pottery, porcelains,
ceramics of every kind, quality, color and beautiful
shape; so were her fine works in metal-iron, steel,
silver and gold. She had great architecture-equal hi
beauty to any in the world. She had great engineering
works. She had great merchants, great businessmen,
great bankers and financiers. Not only was she the
greatest ship-building nation, but she had great
commerce and trade by land and sea which extended
to all known civilized countries. Such was the India
which the British found when they came. 7

It was this wealth that the East India Company proposed

to appropriate. Already in 1686 its Directors declared their
intention to "establish ....a large, well-grounded, sure English
dominion in India for all time to come." 8 The company rented
from the Hindu authorities trading posts at Madras, Calcutta
and Bombay, and fortified them, without permission of the
authorities, with troops and cannon. In 1756 the Rajah of
Bengal, resenting this invasion, attacked the English Fort
William, captured it, and crowded one hundred and forty-six
English prisoners into the "Black Hole" of Calcutta, from
which only twenty-three emerged alive the next morning. A
year later Robert Clive defeated the Bengal forces at Flassey
with the loss of only twenty-two British killed, and thereupon
declared his Company the owner of the richest province in
India. He added further territory by forging and violating
treaties, by playing one native prince against another, and by
generous bribes given and received. Four million dollars were
sent down the river to Calcutta in one shipment. Fie accepted
"presents" amounting to $1,170,000 from Hindu rulers
dependent upon his favour and his guns; pocketed from them,
in addition, an annua] tribute of $140,000; took to opium, was
investigated and exonerated by Parliament, and killed himself.
"When I think," he said, "of the marvelous riches of that country,
and the comparatively small part which I took away, I am
astonished at my own moderation." 9 Such were the morals of
the men who proposed to bring civilization to India.

His successors in the management of the Company now
began a century of unmitigated rape on the resources of India.
They profiteered without hindrance: goods which they sold
in England for $10,000,000 they bought for $2,000,000 in
India. 10 They engaged, corporately and individually, in inland
trade, and by refusing to pay the tolls exacted of Flindu

8

THE CASE FOR INDIA

FOR INDIA

9

traders, acquired a lucrative monopoly. 11 The Company paid
such fabulous dividends that its stock rose to $32,000 a share. 12
Its agents deposed and set up Hindu rulers according to bribes
refused or received ; in ten years they took in, through such
presents, $30,000,000. 13 They forged documents as
circumstances required, and hanged Hindus for forging
documents. 14 Clive had set up Mir Jafar as ruler of Bengal for
$6,192,875 ; Clive's successors deposed him and set up Mir
Kasim on payment of $1,001,345 ; three years later they
restored Mir Jafar for $2,500,825 ; two years later they replaced
him with Najim-ud-Daula for $1,151, 780. 15 They taxed the
provinces under the Company so exorbitantly that two-thirds
of the population fled; 16 defaulters were confined in cages, and
exposed to the burning sun; fathers sold their children to meet
the rising rates. It was usual to demand 50% of the net produce
of the land. "Every effort, lawful and unlawful," says a
Bombay Administration report, written by Englishmen, "was
made to get the utmost out of the wretched peasantry, who
were subjected to torture, in some instances cruel and
revolting beyond all description, if they would not or could
not yield what was demanded." 17 Warren Hastings exacted
contributions as high as a quarter of a million dollars from
native princes to the treasury of the Company; he accepted
bribes to exact no more, exacted more, and annexed the states
that could not pay; 18 he allowed his agents to use torture in
extorting contributions; 19 he helped the Nawab of Oudh to rob
his mother and grandmother in order to pay the Company
$5,000,000; 2 ° he occupied the province of Oudh with his army,
captured it, and then sold it to a prince for $2,500,000; he "lent"
a British army to a Hindu rajah for $2,000,000, and made no
complaint when it was used to slaughter and be slaughtered

for savage purpose. 21 "Everybody and everything," says the
Oxford History of India, "was on sale." 22 And Macaulay writes:

During the five years which followed the departure of
Clive from Bengal, the misgovernment of the English was
carried to such a point as seemed incompatible with the
existence of society ....The servants of the Company. ...forced

the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap Enormous fortunes

were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty
millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of
wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under
tyranny, but never under tyranny like this.... Under their old
masters they had at least one resource: when the evil became
insupportable, the people rose and pulled down the
government. But the English Government was not to be so
shaken off. That Government, oppressive as the most
oppressive form of barbarian despotism, was strong with all
the strength of civilization. 23

By 1858 the crimes of the Company so smelled to heaven
that the British Government took over the captured and
plundered territories as a colony of the Crown; a little island
took over half a continent. England paid the Company
handsomely, and added the purchase price to the public debt
of India, to be redeemed, principal and interest (originally at
10 Vi%), out of the taxes put upon the Hindu people. 24 All the
debts on the Company's books, together with the accrued
interest on these debts, were added to the public obligations
of India, to be redeemed out of the taxes put upon the Hindu
people. Exploitation was dressed now in all the forms of Law-
i.e. the rules laid down by the victors for the vanquished.
Hypocrisy was added to brutality, while the robbery went on.

The British conquest brought certain advantages to India.

10

THE CASE FOR INDIA

FOR INDIA

11

In 1829, Lord William Bentinck decreed the abolition of suttee-
the immolation of widows with their dead husbands-and
acknowledged handsomely the aid given him by native reform
organizations. The Portuguese had abolished the custom in
their Indian possessions three hundred and nine years
before. 25 Men like Bentinck, Munro, Elphinstone and
Macaulay carried into the administration of India something
of the generous liberalism which for a time controlled England
in 1832. The English put an end to the Thugs-an organized
caste of robber s-and completed the abolition of slavery. They
built railways for commercial and military purposes,
introduced factories, and promoted the growth of the
population. They established a small number of schools,
brought the science and technology of the West to India, gave
to the East the democratic ideals of modern Europe, and
played an important part, through their scholars, in revealing
to the world the cultural wealth of India's past.

The price of these benefactions was considerable. It
included, to begin with, the expropriation of state after state
from the native rulers by war or bribery, or the simple decree
of Lord Dalhousie that whenever a Hindu prince died without
leaving a direct heir, his territory should pass to the British ;
in Dalhousie 's administration alone eight states were absorbed
in this peaceful way. Province after province was taken over
by offering its ruler a choice between a pension and war. 26 In
the seventh decade of the nineteenth century England added
4000 square miles to her Indian territory; in the eighth decade,
15,000 square miles; in the ninth, 90,000; in the tenth, 133,-
000. 27 John Morley estimated that during the nineteenth
century alone England carried on one hundred and eleven
wars in India, using for the most part Indian troops; 28 millions

of Hindus shed their blood that India might be slave. The cost
of these wars for the conquest of India was met to the last
penny out of Indian taxes; the English congratulated
themselves on conquering India without spending a cent. 29
Certainly it was a remarkable, if not a magnanimous,
achievement, to steal in forty years a quarter of a million
square miles, and make the victims pay every penny of the
expense. 30 When at last in 1857 the exhausted Hindus resisted,
they were suppressed with "medieval ferocity" ; 31 a favourite
way of dealing with captured rebels was to blow them to bits
from the mouths of cannon. 32 "We took," said the London
Spectator , "at least 100,000 Indian lives in the mutiny." 33 This
is what the English call the Sepoy Mutiny, and what the
Hindus call the War of Independence. There is much in a
name.

Let Englishmen describe the result. A report to the House
of Commons by one of its investigating committees in 1804
stated: "It must give pain to an Englishman to think that since
the accession of the Company the condition of the people of
India has been worse than before." 34 In 1826 the English
Bishop Heber wrote: "The peasantry in the Company's
provinces are, on the whole, worse off, poorer, and more
dispirited, than the subjects of the Native Princes. . .1 met with
very few men who will not, in confidence, own their belief that
the people are overtaxed, and that the country is in a gradual
state of impoverishment." 35 James Mill, historian of India,
wrote: "Under their dependence upon the British Government
.... the people of Oudh and Kama tic, two of the noblest
provinces of India, were, by misgovernment plunged into a
state of wretchedness with which . . . hardly any part of the
earth has anything to compare." 36 "I conscientiously believe/”

12

THE CASE FOR INDIA

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13

said Lt.Col. Briggs in 1830, "that under no Government
whatever, Hindu or Mohammedan, professing to be actuated
by law, was any system so suppressive of the prosperity of
the people at large as that which has marked our
administration." 37 F. J. Shore, British administrator in Bengal,
testified as follows to the House of Commons in 1857:

The fundamental principle of the English has been to
make the whole Indian nation subservient, in every possible
way, to the interests and benefits of themselves. They have
been taxed to the utmost limit; every successive province, as
it has fallen into our possession, has been made a field for
higher exaction; and it has always been our boast how greatly
we have raised the revenue above that which the native rulers
were able to extort. The Indians have been excluded from
every honor, dignity or office which the lowest Englishman
could be prevailed upon to accept. 38

Such was the method of the British acquisition of India;
this is the origin of the British claim to rule India today. And
now, leaving the past, we shall examine the present, and show,
point after point, how English rule is at this very moment, with
all its modest improvements, destroying Hindu civilization,
and the Hindu people.

IV. The Caste System in India

The present caste system in India consists of four classes:
the real Brahmans-i.e., the British bureaucracy; the real
Kshatriyas-i.e., the British army; the real Vaisyas-i.e., the
British traders; and the real Sudras and Untouchables-i.e., the
Hindu people. Consider first the bureaucracy.

Here even the irate lover of liberty will concede some

measure of decency and progress since the Montagu-
Chelmsford Reforms of 1919. One-fourth of India's population
still remains under native princes, who are free, with their
councils, to govern their states in any manner satisfactory to
the British Resident appointed to safeguard the interests of the
Empire. Some of these native states, Mysore and Baroda in
particular, have admirable constitutions, and are advancing
more rapidly in education and freedom than the British
provinces of India. Each of the latter has a legislature; 70 /o of
the members are elected by a property-limited franchise, 25
to 30% are officials or nominees of the British Government.
Above each legislature is a double ministry, or "dyarchy": an
Executive Council appointed by and responsible only to the
British authorities, administering law and order and the
taxation of the land; and a Ministerial Council chosen by the
Provincial Governor from the leaders of the legislature,
responsible to the legislature, and managing transferred and
harmless subjects like education, excise, health, etc. At the
head of each province is a governor appointed by the British
Crown, responsible not to the legislature but to the Viceroy
and the British Parliament, empowered to nullify any law
passed by the legislature, or to pass any law or tax refused
by the legislature, whenever it may seem to him desirable. 39

The central legislature, meeting at Delhi, has a lower
house or Assembly of one hundred and forty-four members,
thirty-one of them appointed by the Government, one hundred
and four elected by a franchise so restricted by property
qualifications that only one person out of two hundred and
fifty is allowed to vote. The upper house, or Council of State,
has sixty members, twenty-seven appointed by the
Government, thirty-three elected by a still more restricted

14

THE CASE FOR INDIA

FOR INDIA

15

franchise. The voters vote not as citizens of India, but as
members of a given social or religious group; the Hindus are
permitted to elect a specified number of Hindus, the Moslems
a number of Moslems, the Europeans a number of Europeans.
The allotment of representatives is out of all proportions to
population. This, if we may believe the British, was required
to meet the fears of the Moslem minority, who number some
22% of the population; in effect, however, it intensifies and
encourages the racial and religious divisions which
statesmanship would seek to heal.

Above this central legislature, and acknowledging no
responsibility to it, 40 stand the Viceroy and his Executive
Council, appointed by the Crown. The Viceroy has, and has
repeatedly used, the power to veto, even over a unanimous
vote of the legislature, any bill which he considers detrimental
to British interests; he has, and has often used, the power to
enact laws rejected by the legislature, and to collect taxes or
make expenditures refused by it. 41 The Simon Report
recommends the continuance of these powers. On many
subjects the legislature is not permitted to vote; on some it is
not permitted to speak. 42 "Expenditures on defense, and in the
political and ecclesiastical departments, . . . and certain salaries
and pensions, need not be voted." 43 Subject to the British
Parliament the Viceroy is omnipotent.

He is not omniscient. He is a political appointee, chosen
for his executive ability as manager of a concern demanding
high dividends out of poor rolling stock. He is seldom selected
for his knowledge of India; sympathy with it would disqualify
him, as it disqualified Lord Ripon. After five years of service
the Viceroy acquires some knowledge of the people and the
country, and is replaced.

With a government responsible to England, not to India,
it is natural that the power of taxation should be freely used.
Though before the coming of the English the land was private
property, the Government made itself the sole owner of the
soil and charged for it a land tax or rental now equal to one-
fifth of the produce. 44 In many cases in the past this land tax
has amounted to half the gross produce, in some cases to more
than the entire gross produce; in general it is two to three times
as high as under pre-English rule. 45 The Government has the
exclusive right to manufacture salt, and adds to its sale-price
a tax amounting to one-half a cent per pound. When we
remember that the average annual income in India is only $33,
and recall the judgment of a missionary paper. The Indian
Witness , that "it is safe to assume that 100,000,000 of the
population of India have an annual income of not more than
$5.00 a head," 46 we begin to understand how much they share
in responsibility for the ill-health and emaciation of the
Hindus.

A member of parliament, Catheart Wilson, says: "The
percentage of taxes in India, as related to the gross produce,
is more than that of any other country." 47 Until recently the
rate was twice as high as in England, three times as high as
in Scotland. Herbert Spencer protested against "the pitiless
taxation which wrings from the poor Indian ryots nearly half
the product of their soil." 48 Another Englishman, the late H.
M. Hyndman, after detailing the proof that taxation in India
was for heavier than in any other country, though its
population is poorer, entitled his book The Bankruptcy of India.
Sir William Hunter, former member of the Viceroy's Council,
said in 1875: "The Government assessment does not leave
enough food to the cultivator to support himself and his family

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17

throughout the year/' 49 Mr. Thorburn, one-time Financial
Commissioner of the Punjab, said that "the whole revenue of
the Punjab .... is practically drawn from the producing
masses." 50 Since the enactment of the income tax this is no
longer true.

I asked the guide at Trichinopoly how the people of India
had found, three or four hundred years ago, the money to
build the vast temples there and at Madura and Tanjore. He
answered that rajahs had been able to build these edified
despite the fact that they had taxed the people much less
severely than the English were doing. Against this terrible
blood-letting the Hindus have no redress; their legislatures are
impotent. And in the midst of the heart-breaking poverty
engendered partly by this taxation, the Government treats
itself, at staggering cost, to gigantic official buildings at Delhi,
needlessly alien in style to the architecture of India ; for seven
months of every year it transfers the Capital, with all its
machinery and personnel, to vacation resorts in the mountains,
at an expense of millions of dollars; and from time to time it
holds gorgeous Durbars, to impress the people who provide
tens of millions for the ceremony. 51 It pays to be free.

The result is that the national debt of India, which was
$35,000,000 in 1792, rose to $105,000,000 in 1805 ; to
$150,000,000 in 1829 ; to $215,000,000 in 1845 ; to $275,000,000
in 1850 ; to $350,000,000 in 1858 ; to $500,000,000 in 1860 ; to
$1,000,000,000 in 1901 ; to $1,535,000,000 in 1913, and to
$3,500,000,000 in 1929. 52 Let these figures tell the tale.

The second caste in India is the British army. The Indian
forces number some 204,000 men; 53 60,000 of them are
British, 54 including all officers; 1,874 are aviators 55 — the last
resort of despotism. There are only a few Hindu officers, and

no Hindu is allowed in the air force or the artillery, but 70%
of the common soldiery is natives. The Hindus are reputed by
the British to be incapable of self-defense, but no British
Government has been willing to believe this to the extent of
allowing Hindus to learn the art of incorporated murder. The
expense of maintaining this army, whose function is the
continual subjection of India by bullets, shells and air-bombs,
is borne by the Indian people. In 1926 its cost was
$200,735,660 — a tax of 3% on the scanty earnings of every man,
woman and child in the land.

Wherever the Indian army sheds its (mostly native)
blood, in Afghanistan or Burma or Mesopotamia or France (for
the government is free to send it anywhere), the expense is met
not by the Empire which it enlarges of defends, but by Indian
revenues alone. When England had to send British troops to
India in 1857 it charged India with the cost not only of
transporting them, maintaining them in India, and bringing
them back home, but with their maintenance in Great Britain
for six months before they sailed. 56 During the nineteenth
century India paid $450,000,000 for wars fought for England
outside of India with Indian troops. She contributed $500,000,000
to the War chest of the Allies, $700,000,000 in subscriptions
to War loans, 800,000 soldiers, and 400,000 laborers to defend
the British Empire outside of India during the Great War, 57 In
1922 64% of the total revenue of India was devoted to this
army of fratricides : Hindus compelled to kill Hindus in Burma
until Burma consented to come under British rule ; Hindus
compelled to defend on the fields of Flanders the Empire
which in every year, as will appear later, was starving ten
million Hindus to death. No other army in the world
consumes so large a proportion of the public revenues. In 1926

18 THE CASE FOR INDIA

the Viceroy announced the intention of the Government to
build a "Royal Indian Navy"; the proposal added that this
navy should be used wherever in the Empire the British
Parliament might care to send it, and that the entire cost of
the navy should be met from the revenues of India. 58 It pays
to be free.

Under these British castes toil the real Pariahs or
Untouchables of India-the Hindu people. In 1833 the British
Parliament decreed that "no native of our Indian Empire shall,
by reason of his color, his descent, or his religion, be incapable
of holding office." 59 In 1858 Queen Victoria, in an official
proclamation, announced it as her "will that, so far as may be,
our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and
impartially admitted to offices in our service, the duties of
which they may be qualified, by their education, ability, and
integrity, duly to discharge." 60

Nevertheless the actual policy of the British in India has
been one of political exclusion and social scorn. Every year the
Indian colleges graduate 12,000 students; every year hundreds
of Hindus graduate from universities in Europe or America,
and return to their native land. But only the lowest places in
the civil service are open to them. Not more than four per cent
of positions bringing over $4,000 per year are held by
Hindus; 61 these berths are reserved for the British. Some of the
invaders are capable executives, well worth their high salaries;
but most of them are poorly rated by their countrymen. Lord
Asquith declared in 1909 that if high places were given to
Hindus half as unfit as the Englishmen who then occupied
them in India it would be regarded as a public scandal. 62 Sir
Louis Mallet, formerly Under-Secretary of State for India, and
Ramsay MacDonald, who studied India at first hand.

FOR INDIA 19

expressed similar opinions. 63 Dr.V.A.Rutherford, M.P. , says :
"For every post held in India by Englishmen, it would be quite
safe to say that there are five or ten Indians well qualified to
discharge its duties, and at less than half the cost.
Englishmen must be doubly paid to bear the heat of India.

Liberals like Elphinstone and Munro, Bentinck and
Macaulay, Wingate and Ripon protested in vain against this
refusal of function to the educated intelligence of India, this
"decapitation of an entire people," as Lajpat Rai called it. It
is the commonest thing," says an American missionary, "to see
Indian scholars and officials, of confessedly high ability, of
very fine training, and of long experience, serving under
young Englishmen who in England would not be thought fit
to fill a government or a business position above the second
or even third class." 66 "Eminent Hindu physicians and
surgeons," says Ramanandra Chatterjee, "are compelled to
spend the best years of their lives in subordinate positions as
'assistant' surgeons, while raw and callow youths lord it over
them and draw four to five times their pay." 67 Sir Thomas
Munro, British Governor of Madras, said, almost a century
ago: "Under the sway of every Mohammedan conqueror, the
natives of India have been admitted to all the highest dignities
of the State; it is only under the British Government that they
have been excluded from this advantage, and held in a
condition, even when employed in a public department, little
superior to that of menial servants." 68 "Since I am writing
confidentially," said Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India, in 1878, "I
do not hesitate to say that both the Government of England
and of India appear to me, up to the present moment, unable
to answer satisfactorily the charge of having taken every
means in their power of breaking to the heart the words of

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21

promise they have uttered the ear/' 69

The final element in the real caste system of India is the
social treatment of the Hindus by the British. The latter may be
genial Englishmen when they arrive, gentlemen famous as
lovers of fair play; but they are soon turned, by the example of
their leaders and the poison of irresponsible power, into the
most arrogant and over-bearing bureaucracy on earth.
"Nothing can be more striking," said a report to Parliament, in
1830, "than the scorn with which the people have been
practically treated at the hands of even those who were actuated
by the most benevolent motives," 70 The English in India act as
if they felt (as doubtless they do) that their superior position
can be best maintained by asserting it at every step, by avoiding
participation in the life of the people, by setting up against them
every aristocratic social distinction, by treating them in every
way as an inferior race. Kohn describes this arrogance as
"known to no other colonizing nation." 71 Sunderland reports
that the British treat the Hindus as strangers and foreigners in
India, in a manner "quite as unsympathetic, harsh and abusive
as was ever seen among the Georgia and Louisiana planters in
the old days of American slavery"; and he tells of several cases
in which British soldiers forcibly ejected from railway
compartments educated Brahmins and courtly rajahs who had
tickets for this space. 72 Savel Zimand corroborates him : "Many
of the distinctions drawn against Indians are like those made
against the negroes in our south - minus lynching. I could fill
a volume with such instances." 73 Sir Henry Cotton, long a high
British official in India, declares that the government there is
as complete a bureaucracy as Russia's under the Czar ; that it
is as autocratic in its methods, as reactionary in its spirit, as
determined as ever the Russian aristocracy was to keep all

power and advantage in its hands. 74 I must add that I did not
myself observe any important instances of this snobbishness,
except in the forgivable exclusion of the Hindus from English
clubs. My critics will remind me of the narrowness and brevity
of my experience.

The result is a pitiful crushing of the Hindu spirit, a
stifling of its pride and growth, a stunting of genius that once
flourished in every city of the land. Have we felt that the
Hindu character is degraded, that it lacks virility and
initiative? But what people could have retained these qualities
under such ruthless alien rule? "Subjection to a foreign yoke,"
says Professor Ross, "is one of the most potent causes of the
decay of nations." 75 Said Charles Francis Adams before the
American Historical Association in 1901: "There is not an
instance in all recorded history... where a so-called inferior
race or community has been elevated in its character, or made
self-sustaining, or self-governing, or even put on the way to
that result through a condition of dependency or tutelage. I
might, without much danger, assert that the condition of
dependency, even for communities of the same race and
blood, always exercises an emasculating and deteriorating
influence. I would undertake, if called upon, to show that this
rule is invariable." 76 "The foreign system under which India
is governed to-day," says Gandhi, "has reduced India to
pauperism and emasculation. We have lost self-confidence." 77

The British charge the Hindu with lack of manliness; but
it is the British who have driven it out of him by the accident
of superior guns and the policy of merciless rule. If there is
rebellion in India to-day let every true Briton be glad; for it
means that India is not quite dead, that the spirit of liberty is
raised again, and that the Hindu can be a man after all.

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23

V. Economic Destruction

The economic condition of India is the inevitable
corollary of its political exploitation.

Even the casual traveller perceives the decay of
agriculture (which absorbs 85% of the people), and the
destitution of the peasant. He sees the Hindu riot in the rice-
fields, wading almost naked in the mud of a foreign tyrant's
land; his loin-cloth is all the finery that he has. In 1915 the
Statistical Department of Bengal, the most prosperous of
India's provinces, calculated the average wage of the able-
bodied agricultural laborer to be $3.60 per month. 78 His hut
is of branches often open at the sides, and loosely roofed with
straw; or it is a square of dried mud adorned with a cot of
dried mud, and covered with mud and sticks and leaves. The
entire house and furnishings of a family of six, including all
their clothing, are worth $10. 79 The peasant cannot afford
newspapers or books, entertainment, tobacco, or drink. Almost
half his earnings go to the Government; and if he cannot pay
the tax, his holding, which may have been in his family for
centuries, is confiscated by the State.

If he is fortunate he escapes from the overtaxed land and
takes refuge in the cities. Provided there are not too many
other applicants, he may get work in Delhi, the capital of India,
carrying away the white master's excrement; sanitary facilities
are unnecessary when slaves are cheap. Or he can go to the
factory, and become, if he is very lucky, one of the 1,409,000
"hands" of India. He will find difficulty in getting a place, for
33% of the factory workers are women, and 8% are children. 80
In the mines 34% of the employees are women, of whom one-
half work underground; 16% of the miners are children. In the

cotton mills of Bombay the heat is exhausting, and the lungs
are soon destroyed by the fluff-laden air; men work there until
they reach a subsistence wage, and then their health breaks
down. More than half the factories use their employees fifty-
four hours a week. The average wage of the factory workers
is sixty to seventy cents a day; though allowance must be
made for the inferior skill and strength of the Hindu as
compared with the European or American labourer long
trained in the ways of machines. In Bombay, in 1922, despite
the factory acts of that year, the average wage of the cotton
workers was 33 cents. In that same year the profit of the
owners of those mills was 125%. This was an "off-year"; in
better years, the owners said, the profits were 200%. The
workman's home is like his wage ; usually it consists of one
room, shared by the family with various animals ; Zimand
found one room with thirty tenants. 81 Such is the industrial
revolution that a British government has allowed to develop
under its control, despite the example of enlightened
legislation in America and England.

The people flock to the factories because the land cannot
support them ; and the land cannot support them because it
is overtaxed, because it is overpopulated, and because the
domestic industries with which the peasants formerly eked out
in winter their gleanings from the summer fields, have been
destroyed by British control of Indian tariffs and trade. For of
old the handicrafts of India were known throughout the
world; it was manufactured — i.e., hand-made — goods which
European merchants brought from India to sell to the West.
In 1680, says the British historian Orme, the manufacture of
cotton was almost universal in India, 82 and the busy spinning-
wheels enabled the women to round out the earnings of their

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25

men. But the English in India objected to this competition of
domestic industry with their mills at home; they resolved that
India should be reduced to a purely agricultural country, and
be forced in consequence to become a vast market for British
machine-made goods. The Directors of the East India
Company gave orders that the production of raw silk should
be encouraged and the manufacture of silk fabrics
discouraged; that silk-winders should be compelled to work
in the Company's factories, and be prohibited, under severe
penalties, from working outside. 83 Parliament discussed ways
and means of replacing Hindu by British industries. A tariff
of 70-80% was placed upon Hindu textiles imported into free-
trade England, while India was compelled, by foreign control
of her government, to admit English textiles almost duty free.
Lest Indian industries should nevertheless continue somehow
to exist, an excise tax was placed on the manufacture of cotton
goods in India. 84 As a British historian puts it:

It is a melancholy instance of the wrong done to
India by the country on which she has become
dependent. Had India been independent, she would
have retaliated, would have imposed prohibitive
duties upon British goods, and would thus have
preserved her own productive industry from
annihilation. This act of self-defense was not permitted
her; she was at the mercy of the stranger. British goods
were forced upon her without paying any duty, and
the foreign manufacturer employed the arm of political
injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a
competitor with whom he could not have contended
on equal terms. 85

And another Englishman wrote:

We have done everything possible to impoverish
still further the miserable beings subject to the cruel
selfishness of English commerce. Under the pretense
of free trade, England has compelled the Hindus to
receive the products of the steam-looms of Lancashire,
Yorkshire, Glasgow, etc., at merely nominal duties;
while the hand wrought manufactures of Bengal and
Behar, beautiful in fabric and durable in wear, have
heavy and almost prohibitive duties imposed on their
importation into England. 86

The result was that Manchester and Paisley flourished,
and Indian industries declined; a country well on the way to
prosperity was forcibly arrested in its development, and
compelled to be only a rural hinterland for industrial England.
The mineral wealth abounding in India's soil was not
explored, for no competition with England was to be
allowed. 87 The millions of skilled artisans whom Indian
handicrafts had maintained were added to the hundreds of
millions who sought support from the land. "India," says
Kohn, "was transformed into a purely agricultural country,
and her people lived perpetually on the verge of starvation." 88
The vast population which might have been comfortably
supported by a combination of tillage and industry, became
too great for the arid soil; and India was reduced to such
penury that to-day nothing is left of her men, her women and
her children but empty stomachs and fleshless bones.

It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000
miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity
to India. But these railways were built not for India but for
England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purposes
of the British army and British trade. If this seems doubtful.

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27

observe their operation. Their greatest revenue comes, not, as
in America, from the transport of goods (for the British trader
controls the rates), but from the third-class passengers— the
Hindus ; but these passengers are herded into almost barren
coaches like animals bound for the slaughter, twenty or more
in one compartment. The railroads are entirely in European
hands, and the Government has refused to appoint even one
Hindu to the Railway Board. The railways lose money year
after year, and are helped by the Government out of the
revenues of the people; these loans to date total over
$100,000,000. The Government guarantees a minimum rate of
interest on railway investments; the British companies who
built the roads ran no risk whatever. No play or
encouragement is given to initiative, competition, or private
enterprise; the worst evils of a state monopoly are in force. All
the losses are borne by the people; all the gains are gathered
by the trader. 89 So much for the railways.

Commerce on the sea is monopolized by the British even
more than transport on land. The Hindus are not permitted
to organize a merchant marine of their own; 90 all Indian goods
must be carried in British bottoms, as an additional strain on
the starving nation's purse; and the building of ships, which
once gave employment to thousands of Hindus, is
prohibited. 91

To this ruining of the land with taxation, this ruining of
industry with tariffs, and this ruining of commerce with
foreign control, add the drainage of millions upon millions of
dollars from India year after year~and the attempt to explain
India's poverty as the result of her superstitions becomes a
dastardly deception practised upon a world too busy to be
well informed. This drain having been denied, it is only

necessary to state the facts, and to introduce them with a
quotation from a document privately addressed by the British
government in India to the Parliament of England.

Great Britain, in addition to the tribute which she
makes India pay her through the customs, derives
benefits from the savings of the service of the three
presidencies (the provinces of Calcutta, NIadras and
Bombay) being spent in England instead of in India;
and in addition to these savings, which probably
amount to $500,000,000, she derives benefit from the
fortunes realized by the European mercantile
community, which are all remitted to England.

This is a general statement; let us fill it in. Consider first
the drain on India through trade. Not merely is this carried
in British ships; far worse than that, there is an astounding
surplus of exports over imports. In the happy years of the
Company there were such balances as $30,000,000 exports and
$3,000,000 imports; 93 latterly the indecency has been reduced,
and the excess of goods taken from India oyer goods brought
into India is now a moderate one-third. In 1927, eg., imports
were $651,600,000, exports were $892,-800,000; the excess of
exports, $241,200,00 0. 94 Where goes the money that pays for
this excess? We are asked to believe that it takes the form of
silver or gold imported and hoarded by the Hindus, but no
man that has seen their poverty can believe so shameless a
myth. Doubtless there is some hoarding, above ail by the
native princes, for India cannot be expected to put full faith
in a banking system controlled by foreign masters. But it is
the officials, the merchants and the manufacturers (most of
whom are British) who take the great bulk of this profit, and
return it to their countries in one form or another. As an East

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29

Indian merchant said in a Parliamentary report in 1853, when
this process of bleeding was on a comparatively modest scale:
"Generally up to 1847, the imports were about $30,000,000 and
the exports about $47,500,000. The difference is the tribute
which the Company received from the country." 95

Consider, second, the drain through fortunes, dividends
and profits made in India and spent abroad. The British come
as officials or soldiers or traders; they make their money and
return to Great Britain. Let an Englishman, Edmund Burke,
describe them — and intensify his description to-day in
proportion to the growth of British positions, manufactures
and commerce in India.

They have no more social habits with the people
than if they still resided in England ; nor indeed any
species of intercourse but that which is necessary to
make a sudden fortune. Animated with all the avarice
of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in
one after another ; wave after wave , and there is
nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless,
hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and
passage, with appetites continually renewing for a
food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit
made by an Englishman is lost forever to India. 96

Consider, third, the drain through salaries and pensions
derived from India and spent abroad. In 1927 Lord Winterton
showed, in the House of Commons, that there were then some
7500 retired officials in Great Britain drawing annually
$17,500,000 in pensions from the Indian revenue ; 97 Ramsay
MacDonald put the figure at $20,000,000 a year. 98 When
England, which is almost as over-populated as Bengal, sends
its sons to India, she requires of them twenty-four years of

service, reduced by four years of furloughs ; she then retires
them for life on a generous pension, paid by the Hindu people.
Even during their service these officials send their families or
their children to live for the most part in England; and they
support them there with funds derived from India. 99 Almost
everything bought by the British in India, except the more
perishable foods, is purchased from abroad. 100 A great
proportion of the funds appropriated for supplies by the
Government of India is spent in England.

As early as 1783 Edmund Burke predicted that the
annual drain of Indian resources to England without
equivalent return would eventually destroy India. 101 From
Plassey to Waterloo, fifty-seven years, the drain of India's
wealth to England is computed by Brooks Adams at two-and-
a-half to five billion dollars. 102 He adds, what Macaulay
suggested long ago, that it was this stolen wealth from India
which supplied England with free capital for the development
of mechanical inventions, and so made possible the Industrial
Revolution. 103 In 1901 Dutt estimated that one half of the net
revenues of India flowed annually out of the country, never
to return. 104 In 1906 Mr.Hyndman reckoned the drain at
$40,000,000 a year. A. J. Wilson valued it at one-tenth of the
total annual production of India. 105 Montgomery Martin,
estimating the drain at $15,000,000 year in 1838, calculated that
these annual sums, retained and gathering interest in India,
would amount in half a century to $40,000,000,000. 106 Though
it may seem merely spectacular to juggle such figures, it is
highly probable that the total wealth drained from India since
1757, if it had all been left and invested in India, would now
amount, at a low rate of interest, to $400,000,000,000. Allow
for money reinvested in India, and a sum remains easily

30

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31

equivalent to the difference between the poorest and the
richest nations in the world. The same high rate of taxation
which has bled India to perhaps a mortal weakness, might
have done her no permanent injury if the wealth so taken had
all been returned into the economy and circulation of the
country ; but bodily withdrawn from her as so much of it was,
it has acted like a long-continued transfusion of vital blood.
"So great an economic drain out of the resources of the land,"
says Dutt, "would impoverish the most prosperous countries
on earth; it has reduced India to a land of famines more
frequent, more widespread and more fatal, than any known
before in the history of India, or of the world." 107

Sir Wilfred Seawen Blunt sums it up from the point of
view of a true Englishman:

India's famines have been severer and more
frequent, its agricultural poverty has deepened, its
rural population has become more hopelessly in debt,
their despair more desperate. The system of constantly
enhancing the land values (i.e. raising the valuation
and assessment) has not been altered. The salt
tax... still robs the very poor. What was bad twenty-
five years ago is worse now. At any rate there is the
same drain of India's food to alien mouths. Endemic
famines and endemic plagues are facts no official
statistics can explain away. Though myself a good
Conservative...! own to being shocked at the bondage
in which the Indian people are held;... and I have
come to the conclusion that if we go on developing the
country at the present rate, the inhabitants, sooner or
later, will have to resort to cannibalism, for there will
be nothing left for them to eat. 108

VI. Social Destruction

From such poverty come ignorance, superstition, disease
and death. A people reduced to these straits cannot afford
education; they cannot afford the taxes required to maintain
adequate schools; they cannot afford to spare their children
from productive employment during the years of public
instruction; every penny is taken from them that could have
been used for proper education.

When the British came there was, throughout India, a
system of communal schools, managed by the village
communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed
these village communities, and took no steps to replace the
schools; even to-day, after a century of effort to restore them,
they stand at only 66% of their number a hundred years ago. 109
There are now in India 730,000 villages, and only 162,015
primary schools. 110 Only 7% of the boys and 1Vi% of the girls
receive schooling; i.e., 4% of the whole. 111 Such schools as the
Government has established are not free, but exact a tuition
fee which, though small to a Western purse, looms large to a
family always hovering on the edge of starvation.

We have been told that the country schools do not grow
more rapidly because women teachers cannot be found for
them; and that these teachers refuse to go because they fear
that they will be raped. But women are considerably safer in
India than in New York; not to speak of the invariably passive
mood of the verb seduce. Every student of India knows that
the country schools lag behind not for such lurid reasons, but
simply because the pay for new teachers is $5.00 a month, for
a trained teacher $5.00 to $6.50 a month, for principals $7-10
a month. Until 1921 the pay for primary school teachers in the

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33

Madras Presidency was $24-36 a year. 112 (Some allowance
must be made for the lower cost of commodities in India.) The
Government spends every year on education eight cents a
head; 113 it spends on the army eighty-three cents a head. 114

In 1911 a Hindu representative, Gokhale, introduced a
bill for universal compulsory primary education in India; it
was defeated by the British and Government-appointed
members. In 1916 Patel introduced a similar bill, which was
defeated by the British and Government-appointed
members; 115 the Government could not afford to give the
people schools. Instead, it spent most of its eight cents for
education on secondary schools and universities, where the
language used was English, the history, literature, customs
and morals taught were English, and young Hindus, after
striving amid poverty to prepare themselves for college, found
that they had merely let themselves in for a ruthless process
that aimed to de-nationalize and de-Indianize them, and turn
them into imitative Englishmen. The first charge on a modern
state, after the maintenance of public health, is the
establishment of education, universal, compulsory and free.
But the total expenditure for education in India is less than
one-half the educational expenditure in New York State. 116 In
the quarter of a century between 1882 and 1907; while public
schools were growing all over the world, the appropriation for
education in British India increased by $2,000,000; in the same
period appropriations for the fratricide army increased by
$43,000,000. 117 It pays to be free.

Hence the 93% illiteracy of India. In several provinces
literacy was more widespread before the British took
possession than it is now after a century and a half of British
control; 118 in several of the states ruled by native princes it is

higher than in British India. "The responsibility of the British
for India's illiteracy seems to be beyond question." 119 The
excuse that caste interferes with education will not hold; caste
did not interfere with the crowding of every Hindu class
indiscriminately in railway coaches, tram-cars and factories;
it need not have interfered with schools; the best way to
conquer caste would have been through schools. Is it any
wonder that a people so stupefied with poverty and lack of
education is too ignorant to use birth-control, and practises
superstitions worse even than those of the West?

Instead of encouraging education, the Government
encouraged drink. When the British came, India was a sober
nation. "The temperance of the people," said Warren Hastings,
"is demonstrated in the simplicity of their food and their total
abstinence from spirituous liquors and other substances of
intoxication." 120 With the first trading posts established by the
British, saloons were opened for the sale of rum, and the East
India Company made handsome profits from the trade. 121
When the Crown took over India it depended on the saloons
for a large part of its revenue; the license system was so
arranged as to stimulate drinking and sales. The Government
revenue from such licenses has increased seven-fold in the last
forty years ; in 1922 it stood at $60,000,000 annu ally-three
times the appropriation for schools and universities.

Miss Mayo tells us that Hindu mothers feed opium to
their children; and she concludes that India is not fit for Home
Rule. What she says is true; what she does not say makes what
she says worse than a straight-forward lie. She does not tell
us (though she must have known) that women drug their
children because the mothers must abandon them every day
to go to work in the factories. She does not tell us that the

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opium is grown only by the Government, and is sold
exclusively by the Government ; that its sale, like the sale of
drink through saloons, is carried on despite the protest of the
Nationalist Congress, the Industrial and Social Conferences,
the Provincial Conferences, the Brahmo-Somaj, the Arya-
Somaj, the Mohammedans and the Christians ; that there are
seven thousand opium shops in India, operated by the British
Government, in the most conspicuous places in every town; 122
that the Central Legislature in 1921 passed a bill prohibiting
the growth or sale of opium in India, and that the Government
refused to act upon it; 123 that from two to four hundred
thousand acres of India's soil, sorely needed for the raising of
food, are given over to the growing of opium ; 124 and that the
sale of the drug brings to the Government one-ninth of its total
revenue every year. 125 She does not tell us that Burma
excluded opium by law until the British came, and is now
over-run with it; that the British distributed it free in Burma
to create a demand for it ; 126 that whereas the traffic has been
stopped in the Philippines, England has refused, at one World
Opium Conference after another, to abandon it in India; that
though she has agreed to reduce the export of opium by 10%
yearly, she has refused to reduce its sale in India ; that the
Report of the Government Retrenchment Commission of 1925
emphasized " the importance of safe -guarding opium sales as
an important source of revenue/' and recommended "no
further reduction''; 127 that when Gandhi by a peaceful anti-
opium campaign in Assam had reduced the consumption of
the drug there by one-half, the Government put a stop to his
labours and jailed, forty -tour of his aides. 125 She does not tell
us that the health, courage and character of the Hindu people
have been undermined through this ruthless drugging oi a

nation by men pretending to be Christians.

On July 10, 1833, Lord Macaulay addressed the House
of Commons as follows:

It was . . . the practice of the miserable tyrants whom
we found in India, that when they dreaded the
capacity and spirit of some distinguished subjects, and
yet could not venture to murder him, to administer to
him daily dose of the pousta , a preparation of opium,
the effect of which was in a few months to destroy all
the bodily and mental powers of the wretch who was
drugged with it, and turn him into a helpless idiot.
That detestable artifice, more horrible than
assassination itself, was worthy of those who
employed it. It is no model for the English nation. We
shall never consent to administer the pousta to a whole
community, to stupefy and paralyze a great people/ 29

These words were spoken almost a century ago.

VII. The Triumph of Death

The last chapter is disease and death.

The emaciation of the Hindus sickens the traveller; closed
fingers can be run up around their bare legs from the ankles
to the knees. In the cities 34% of them are absent from work,
on any day, from illness or injury. They are too poor to afford
foods rich in mineral salts; they are too poor to buy fresh
vegetables, much less to buy meat. The water-supply, which
is usually the first obligation of a government, is in primitive
condition, after a century or more of British rule; dysentery
and malaria have been eliminated from Panama and Cuba, but
they flourish in British India. Once the Hindu was known to

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be among the cleanest of the clean; 130 and even to-day he
bathes every morning, and washes every morning the simple
garment that he wears; but the increase of poverty has made
social sanitation impossible. Until 1918 the total expenditure
on public health, of both the central and the provincial
governments combined, was only $5,000,000 a year, for
240,000,000 people — an appropriation of two cents per
capita. 131

Sir William Hunter, once Director-General of Indian
Statistics, estimated that 40,000,000 of the people of India were
seldom or never able to satisfy their hunger. 132 Weakened with
malnutrition, they offer low resistance to infections; epidemics
periodically destroy millions of them. Inl901, 2,72,000 died of
plague introduced from abroad; in 1902, 5000,000 died of
plague; in 1903, 800,000; in 1904, 1,000,000. 133 In 1918 there
were 125,000,000 cases of influenza, and 12,500,000 recorded
deaths. 134

We can now understand why there are famines in India.
Their cause, in plain terms, is not the absence of sufficient
food, but the inability of the people to pay for it. Famines have
increased in frequency and severity under British rule. From
1770 to 1900, 25,000,000 Hindus died of starvation; 15,000,000
of these died in the last quarter of the century, in the famines
of 1877,1889,1897, and 1900. 135 Contemporary students 136
estimate that 8,000,000 will die of starvation in India during
the present year. It was hoped that the railways would solve
the problem by enabling the rapid transport of food from
unaffected to affected regions; the fact that the worst famines
have come since the building of the railways proves the cause
has not been the lack of transportation, not the failure of the
monsoon rains (though this, of course, is the occasion), nor

even over-population (which is a contributory factor) ; behind
all these as the fundamental source of the terrible famines in
India, lies such merciless exploitation, such unbalanced
exportation of goods, and such brutal collection of high taxes
in the very midst of famine, 137 that the starving peasants
cannot pay what is asked for the food that the railways bring
them. American charity has often paid for the relief of famine
in India while the Government was collecting taxes from the
dying. "There has never been a single year," says Dutt, "when
the food-supply of the country was insufficient for the
people." 138 Let the late President of Union Theological
Seminary, Dr. Charles C. Hall, speak:

The obvious fact stares us in the face that there is
at no time, in no year, any shortage of food-stuffs in
India. The trouble is that the taxes imposed by the
British Government being 50% of the produce, the
Indian starves that India's annual revenue may not be
diminished by a dollar. 80% of the whole population
has been thrown back upon the soil because England's
discriminating duties have ruined practically every
branch of native manufacture. We send shiploads of
grain to India, but there is plenty of grain in India. The
trouble is that the people have been ground down till
they are too poor to buy it. Famine is chronic there
now, though the same shipments of food-stuffs are
made annually to England, the same drainage of
millions of dollars goes on every year. 139

The final item is the death-rate. In England the death-rate
is 13 per 1000 per year; in the United States it is 12; in India it
is 32. 140 Flalf the children born in Bengal die before reaching
the age of eight. 141 In a recent year (1921) the infant mortality

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in Bombay was 666 per 1000. 142 Lt. Col. Dunn, of the Indian
Medical Service, says the one-half of the death-rate is
preventable; if we doubt this we need only study the case of
Cuba, which under Spanish rule was ridden with malaria,
typhus and cholera, and had one of the world's highest death-
rates, while now, under freedom, it has become one of the
healthiest of countries, arid its death-rate is among the lowest
known. 14 J But in India ten are born that three, or six, or eight
of them may die within a year.

This is the conclusion of the play: taxation, exploitation,
starvation, death.

And now, having quoted authorities sufficiently to guard
against relying on my own too brief experience, I may be
permitted, despite that limitation, to express my own
judgment and feeling. I came to India admiring the British,
marvelling at their imperial capacity for establishing order and
peace, and thankful for the security which their policing of the
world's waters have given to every traveller. I left India feeling
that its awful poverty is an unanswerable indictment of its
alien government, that so far from being an excuse for British
rule, it is overwhelming evidence that the British ownership
of India has been a calamity and a crime. For this is quite
unlike the Mohammedan domination: those invaders came to
stay, and their descendants call India their home; what they
took in taxes and tribute they spent in India, developing its
industries and resources, adorning its literature and art. If the
British had done likewise, India would to-day be a flourishing
nation. But the present plunder has now gone on beyond
bearing; year by year it is destroying one of the greatest and
gentlest peoples of history.

The terrible thing is that this poverty is not a beginning,
it is an end; it is not growing less, it is growing worse; England
is not "preparing India for self-government," she is bleeding
it to death, "Even as we look on," said another loyal
Englishman, H.M.Hyndman, "India is becoming feebler and
feebler. The very life-blood of the great multitude under our
rule is slowly, yet ever faster ebbing away." 144

Any man who sees this crime, and does not speak out,
is a coward. Any Englishman or an American, seeing it and
not revolted by it, does not deserve his country or his name.

GANDHI

41

CHAPTER TWO

GANDHI

I. Portrait

Picture the ugliest, slightest, weakest man in Asia, with
face and flesh of bronze, close cropped gray head, high cheek
bones, kindly little brown eyes, a large and almost toothless
mouth, larger ears, an enormous nose, thin arms and legs, clad
in a loin-cloth, standing before an English judge in India, on
trial because he has preached liberty to his countrymen.
Picture him again similarly dressed, at the Viceroy's palace in
Delhi, in conference on equal terms with the highest
representative of England. Or picture him seated on a small
carpet in a bare room at his Satyagrahashram, or School of
Truth-Seekers, at Ahmedabad; his bony legs crossed under
him in Yogi fashion, soles upward, his hands busy at a
spinning-wheel, his face lined with the sufferings of his people,
his mind active with ready answers to every questioner of
freedom. This naked weaver is both the spiritual and the
political leader of 320,000,000 Hindus; when he appear in
public, crowds gather round him to touch his clothing or to
kiss his feet; 1 not since Buddha had India so reverenced any
man. He is in all probability the most important, and beyond
all doubt the most interesting, figure in the world today.
Centuries hence he will be remembered when of his
contemporaries hardly a name will survive.

He receives you without effusion or ceremony for you
he provides a chair, but he is content to squat on the floor. He

40

looks at you a moment smiles his acknowledgment of your
interest in Indias, ands resumes his spinning while he talks.
Four hours a day he spins the coarse Khaddar. His only
possessions in the worlds are three Khaddar cloths, which serve
him as a wardrobe; once a rich lawyer, he has given all his
property to the poor, and his wife, after some womanly
hesitation has followed his example. He sleeps on a piece of
Khaddar spread on the bare floor or the earth. He lives on nuts,
plantains, lemons, oranges, dates, rice and goat's milk; 2 often
for months together he takes nothing but milk and fruit; he
has tasted meat but once in his life. Usually he eats with the
children whom he teaches; they are his sole creation, and when
His Majesty's officers came to arrest him, in 1922 , they founds
him frolicking in the yard with these youngsters. He not only
prays, rising at four a.m. for an hour of prayer and meditation,
but he fasts. "I can as well do without my eyes," he says, "as
without fasts. What the eyes are for the outer world, fasts are
for the inner;" 3 as the bloods thins, the mind clears,
irrelevancies fall away, and fundamental things, sometimes
even the Soul of the World, come into vision like mountain-
tops through a cloud.

At the same time that he fasts to see God, he keeps one
toe on the earth, and advises his followers to take an enema
daily when they fast, lest they be poisoned with the acid
products of the body's self-consumption just as they are
finding God. 4 When, in 1924, the Moslems and the Hindus
were engaged in killing one another theologically, and paid
no heed to his pleas for peace, he went without food for three
weeks to move them. He has become so weak and frail
through fasts and privations that when he addresses audiences
he must, in most cases, speak from a chair. 5

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He carries his asceticism into the field of sex, and like
Tolstoi he would limit all physical inter-course to deliberate
reproduction. In his youth he indulged the flesh too much, and
the news of his father's death surpiised him in the arms of
love. He returned with passionate remorse to the Hindu
doctrine of Brahmacharya which had been preached to him in
his youth — absolute abstention from all sensual desire. He
persuaded his wife that they should live henceforth like
brother and sister, avoiding all sexual behavior; and "from that
time," he tells us, "all dissension ceased." When later he
realised that India's basic need was birth- control, he adopted
not the methods of the West, but the theories of Malthus and
Tolstoi.

Is it right for us, who know the situation to bring
forth children? We only multiply slaves and weaklings
if we continue the process of procreation whilst we feel
and remain helpless . . . Not till India has become a free
nation... have we the right to bring forth progeny... I
have not a shadow of doubt that married people, if
they wish well to the country and want to see India
become a nation of strong and handsome, well-formed
men and women, would practise self-restraint and
cease to procreate for the time being. 7

With such a history behind him he is naturally a rigorist
in morals. He believes with Christ that he who looks upon a
woman with desire in his heart already committed adultery.
He abolishes prostitution, and denounces the West for abusing
a minority of the "nobler sex" in order to satisfy bachelors and
adulterers. 8 Prostitutes have been comforted by his message,
and have come great distances to lay their savings at his feet
and pledge themselves to continue. 9 Fie admits that India is

over-sexed, and partly for that reason he would welcome the
total prohibition of alcoholic beverages in his country. 10 Even
art seems to him a vain and frivolous thing when it is divorced
from nature and morals.

I love music and all the other arts, but I do not
attach such value to them as is generally done. I
cannot, for example, recognize the value of all these
activities which require special technical knowledge
for their understanding... When I gaze at the star-
sown heaven, and the infinite beauty it affords my
eyes, that means more to me than all that human art
can give me. That does not mean that I ignore the
value of those works generally called artistic; but
personally, in comparison with the infinite beauty of
nature, 1 feel their unreality too intensely... Life is
greater than all art. 11

Added to these elements in his character, which must
make him an unattractive figure to our Epicurean West, are
qualities strangely like those that (we are told) distinguished
Christ. He does not mouth the name of the Founder of
Christianity but he acts as if the Sermon on the Mount were
his perpetual guide. Not since St. Francis of Assisi has any life
known to history been so marked by gentleness,
disinterestedness, simplicity of soul, and forgiveness of
enemies. It is to the credit of his opponents, but still more to
his own, that his courtesy to them has been so consistent that
it has won from them a fine courtesy in return; the
Government sends him to jail with the most profuse apologies.
He has never shown rancor or resentment. Three times he has
been attacked by mobs, and been beaten almost to death; not
once has he retaliated; and when a leading assailant was

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arrested he refused to make any charge against him. Shortly
after the worst of all riots between Muslims and Hindus, when
the Mohammedans of Moplahs butchered hundreds of
unarmed Hindus and offered their prepuces as a convenant
to Allah, these same Moplahs were stricken with famine;
whereupon Gandhi collected funds for them from all India,
and (with no regard for the best precedents in matters of
charity) forwarded every anna, without deduction for
"overhead," to the starving enemy. 12

Missionaries in India hail him as the greatest Christian
of our time. Like Buddha and Miranda, he has suffered with
those he has seen suffer; he has taken all the tribulation of his
people upon himself, fighting for their freedom and fasting for
their sins. And so a nation that would never have been thrilled
by a purely secular call, has put itself trustfully into his hands,
has accepted his hard doctrine of peaceful resistance, and has
anointed him as its leader and prophet, its Mahatma , or Great
Soul. We hcive the astonishing phenomenon of a revolution led
by a saint.

II. Preparation

He was born in 1869 at Porbander, in the province of
Gujarat, and was named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. His
family belonged to the Vaisya caste, or business class, and to
the Jain sect of religious devotees, who practised the principle
of never injuring a living thing. Elis father was a capable
administrator but an unorthodox financier; he lost place after
place through honesty, gave nearly all his wealth to charity,
and left the rest to his family. 13 Mohandas went to the village
school, and increased rapidly in wisdom and understanding.

While still a boy he became an atheist, being displeased with
the gallantries of certain adulterous Hindu gods; and to make
clear his everlasting scorn for religion, he scandalized
everyone by eating meat. The meat disagreed with him, and
he became religious again.

At eight he was engaged, and at twelve he was married,
to Kasturbai, who has been loyal to him through all his
adventures, riches, poverty, imprisonments, and Brahmacharya .
At eighteen he passed examinations for the university, and
went to London to study law. His mother was loath to see him
go, and exacted from him a promise, sworn to before a priest,
to abstain from wine, meat, and sexual relations while away
from India: 14 In London he did his best to become an "English
gentleman"; he dressed with devotion, and took lessons in
elocution, dancing, violin and French. 15 The schedule proved
too much for him, and in a lucid interval he threw over the
whole social curriculum, and resolved to abandon forever the
attempt to be an Englishman. When he returned to India he
was more Hindu than before.

Those years in London taught him three subversive
ideas : nationalism, democracy, and Christianity. He observed
the free life of the English, and their control over their
Government; and he conceived the idea that his own people
would enjoy a like independence. He admired the English
form of government, and wished that British practice would
conform with English theory; he marveled that a people so
dedicated to liberty should be capable of enslaving a nation.
The London Vegetarian Society won him to its creed, and the
English Theosophists persuaded him to study the most famous
production of his country's literature, the Bhagavad-Gita. 16 He
read Mazzini, and felt for India all that that passionate patriot

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had felt for Italy. He read Thoreau, and learned from him the
art of civil disobedience; he translated parts of Plato and
Ruskin; and he consumed page after page of Tolstoi. Here
again was the doctrine of resistance without violence; here too
was the condemnation of all non-reproductive sexual relations.
In his first year in England he read eighty books on
Christianity; but the only one of them that seemed to him to
understand Christ was the New Testament. The Sermon on the
Mount "went straight to my heart on the first reading." 17 He
took the counsels to return good for evil, and to avoid all
violence even to enemies, as the highest expression of all
human idealism; and he resolved rather to fail with these than
the succeeded without them.

He had gone to England in 1888; in 1891, having been
admitted to the Bar, he returned to India. For a while he
practised law in Bombay. He refused to prosecute for debt,
and always reserved the right to abandon a case which he had
come to think unjust. 18 In 1893 he received a call from South
Africa to conduct some litigation for a Hindu firm doing
business in Pretoria. When for this second time he left India
he thought he would return to it presently and permanently;
he did not suspect that Africa would hold him for twenty
years. Within a short time after his arrival he had built up for
himself a profitable practice in Johannesburg, with an income
of over $20,000 a year. 19 He was, for those days, and at a
remarkably early age, a rich man.

He found his fellow-Hindus in South Africa bitterly
maltreated by prejudice and law. They had come to Natal
originally as contract labourers; gradually they had built up
a thriving settlement, whose growth gave the English and the
Boers an unpleasant topic to agree ■ ^ a Hr ,1

peoples took various means of suggesting to the Hindus the
desirability of their returning to India at an early date : they
threw them out of trains and hotels, insulted them, kicked
them down stairs, and had them beaten up by those expert
gangs which can be hired for these purposes in all civilized
communities. 20 In 1906 the South African Government passed
an act requiring the Hindus to report to the police for the
taking of their thumb-prints. In 1912 the Union Court of South
Africa declared all marriages by Hindu rite to be null and
void; and the Government of Natal laid upon every Hindu in
the province a poll tax of $15 a year.

Gandhi was about to return to India when a committee
of Hindus asked his help against these disabilities. They
offered him large fees. He agreed to remain and give himself
to their cause; he refused all pay, abandoned the comfortable
mode of life to which he had become accustomed, and devoted
all his time, for the next twenty years, to the cause of his
countrymen in Africa. He organized and guided them, taught
them peaceful resistance, and built for their refuge a rural
retreat where any Hindu might come and live if, like Gandhi,
he would take the vows of poverty and non-violence. He
presented the case of his people in London, and secured large
concessions. He presented their in India, and roused the
mother country to indignation. When he returned to Africa an
enraged mob of white men attacked him at the pier, and he
was saved only because an Englishwoman bravely interposed
her own body between him and the blows. It was a
characteristic example of the English spirit of fair play in a
surrounding of British stupidity : the crowd had long before
announced its intentions, and an honorable government could
easily have dispersed it.

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49

Gandhi himself was not over-consistent in those days.
When England fought the Boers he favored England,
organized a Red Cross unit of a thousand Hindus, and led
them so intrepidly under fire that he was cited for bravery and
awarded a medal of honor. He had hoped that a grateful
England would repay this loyalty of his race; instead, the
concessions promised to him in London were ignored, and
when he protested he was sent to jail. The authorities were
soon compelled to release him, for the Hindus, freed from his
leadership, had reverted to violence. The Government
suggested to him that if he would abbey the registration law
it would remove many of the disabilities affecting the Hindus.
He agreed, but on the way to register he was set upon by some
Mohammedans among his followers, who, inspired with the
thought that he was betraying them, beat him nearly to death.
He had himself carried to the place of registry, registered, and
fell unconscious. The British arrested the chief assailant, but
Gandhi refused to make a complaint against him. "The man
will yet be my friend," he said.

His people now followed him in his compromise, and the
Government rewarded them with a promise to repeal the poll
tax. When the promise was not kept, Gandhi led a vast
procession of Hindus in protest. He was again arrested, and
was sentenced to fifteen months' imprisonment. Finally in
1913 the Government yielded, repealed the poll tax, and
restored the validity of Hindu marriage. 21 A year later Gandhi
returned to India.

III. Revolution by Peace

Perhaps only now, when he came back to his native

country as a mature man, seasoned with experience and
tempered with suffering, did he realize the extent of the
destitution and slavery of his people. He was horrified, in his
sharp social conscience, by the skeletons whom he saw in the
fields of India, and the lowly Outcastes in the towns. It
dawned upon him that the disabilities of his countrymen
abroad were merely on consequence of their poverty and
subjection at home. He was moved as Buddha had been by
the sight of his fellows' suffering.

I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British
connection had made India more helpless than she
ever was before, politically or economically.... The
Government established by law in British India is
carried on for this exploitation of the masses. No
sophistry, no jugglery in figures, can explain away the
evidence the skeletons in many villages present to the
naked eye. I have no doubt whatsoever that both
England and the town- dwellers of India will have to
answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against
humanity which is perhaps unequalled in history. 22

At the height of his first non-co-operation movement he
offered to the Government to abandon his whole program of
resistance to it, and to co-operate with it loyally, if it would
undertake an energetic campaign against starvation in India. 23
The Government did not see the necessity.

He had hardly established himself at home when the
Great War began. That same preference for loyalty and co-
operation which had marked him in Africa drove him now to
devote his energies and abilities as a leader to helping the
cause of Britain in every way but violence. His naive
confidence in the innocence of the Allies went so far that he

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advocated the enlistment of Hindus who did not accept the
principle of non-violence. He did not, at that time, agree with
those who called for the full independence of India ; he
believed that British misgovernment in India was an exception,
and that British government in general was good; that British
government in India was bad just because it violated all the
principles of British government at home; that if the British
people could only be made to understand the case of the
Hindus, it would soon accept them in full brotherhood into a
commonwealth of free dominations. 24 He trusted that when
the War was over, and Britain counted India's sacrifice for the
Empire in men and wealth, it would not hesitate any longer
to give her liberty. In 1918 he wrote :

If I could make my countrymen retrace their steps,
I would make them withdraw all the Congress
resolutions and not whisper "Home Rule" or
"responsible government" during the pendency of the
War. I would make India offer all her able-bodied sons
as a sacrifice to the Empire at its critical moment; and
I know that India, by this very act, would become the
most favourite partner, and racial distinctions would
become a thing of the past. 25
At the close of the War the British met the movement for
Home Rule by passing the Rowlatt Acts, which put an end to
freedom of speech and press ; by announcing, through Lord
Birkenhead and Lloyd George, that England had no intention
of releasing her hold on India; by establishing the impotent
legislature of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms ; and finally,
by the massacre of Amritsar.*

Gandhi was horrified. On August 1, 1920, he wrote as
* Cf. Chapter Three

follows to the Viceroy :

It is not without a pang that I return the Kaisar-i-
Hind Gold Medal granted to me by your predecessor
for my humanitarian work in South Africa; the Zulu
War Medal, granted in South Africa for my services
as an officer in charge of the Indian Volunteer
Ambulance Corps in 1906; and the Boer War Medal for
my services as assistant super intendent of the Indian
Volunteer Stretcher Bearer Corps during the Boer
War... I can retain neither respect nor affection for a
Government which has been moving from wrong to
wrong in order to defend its immorality... I have
therefore ventured to suggest non-co-operation, which
enables those who wish, to dissociate themselves from
the Government, and which, if unattended by violence,
must compel the Government to retrace its steps and
undo its ways. 26

From his quiet Ashram he sent forth throughout India
a call for Satyagmha, truth-seeking, truth-gripping; no mere
passive resistance, but an active civil disobedience to an
unjust government, and a refusal to co-operate with it in
any way. He had derived the idea from Thoreau, Tolstoi,
and Christ; he had been encouraged in it by his
correspondence with Tolstoi, and by the great Russian's
"Address to a Hindu"; he had practised it successfully in
Africa and in India. In 1918 he had found the peasants of
Kaira, in his own province of Gujarat, suffering from
oppressive taxation; he had advised them to refuse any
taxes at all until the Government should come to reason;
they had taken his advice, and borne patiently the
punishments inflicted upon them ; and they had won. 27

52

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GANDHI

53

As offered by him now, Satyagraha meant many things :
the surrender of all titles and offices held by Hindus under
the Government ; abstention from all Governmental functions,
administrative or social ; the gradual withdrawal of Hindu
children form Government schools, and the establishment of
national schools and colleges to take their place ; the
withdrawal of Hindu funds from Government bonds; the
boycott of Government courts, and the establishment of
private arbitration tribunals to settle disputes among Hindus;
refusal to perform military service ; the boycott of British
goods ; and the propaganda of Szuaraj, Self-Rule . 28 Even the
protection of the police and the state were to be scorned. "The
sooner we cease to rely on Government-protection against one
another, the better it will be for us, and the quicker and more
lasting will be the solution ." 29

More important than all these details to Gandhi was the
method to be used; for without the method the goal would
be worthless. Greater than Satyagraha was Ahimsa , without
injury. Unlike the Revolutionists of the West, Gandhi considers
no end worth while whose attainment requires violence; the
greatest aim of all is to lift man out of the beast; violence is a
reversion to the jungle, and the ability to oppose without
hating or injuring is the test of the higher man.

This gospel of a loving resistance pleased the Hindus
because for two thousand years and more their religions had
taught them gentleness and peace. Buddha had counselled
them, five centuries before Christ, never to injure any living
thing; Mahavira, earlier than Buddha, had instructed his Jain
sect likewise ; Brahminism had taken over the doctrine, and
had made it almost universal in India. Gandhi's family had
belonged to just the sect which had set most store on the

practice of Ahimsa. Religion seemed to Gandhi more important
than politics, and humanness more than independence ; his
fundamental conception of religion was reverence for all life.
He added to the Hindu form of the principle Christ's doctrine
of loving one's enemies ; time and again he has pardoned his
foes ; and in the breadth of his charity he loves even
Englishmen . 30

He is not quite a doctrinaire ; he recognizes exceptions.
"I believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice
and violence, I would advise violence ." 31 If a man is peaceful
out of fear, Gandhi would rather have him be violent. He says,
with characteristic candor and bravery, risking his leadership
with a word : "The Hindu, as a rule, is a coward ." 32 Certain
Hindus allowed robbers to loot their homes and insult their
women; he asks : "Why did not the owners of the houses
looted die in the attempt to defend their possessions? . . . My
non-violence does not admit of running away from danger,
and leaving dear ones unprotected ." 33 For too many
weaklings, he says, non-violence serves merely "as a mask to
cover their abject cowardice... Must they not develop the
ability to defend themselves violently before they could be
expected to appreciate non-violence ?" 34 Nevertheless there is
in such cases something higher than violent resistance ; it is
when a man attacked resists as well as he can without
violence, and then, overcome, refuses to surrender, but accepts
the blows unanswered, and if necessary dies at his post. So it
should be with India.

I would risk violence a thousand times rather than
emasculation of the race. I would rather have India
resort to arms to defend her honor than that she
should in a cowardly manner become or remain a

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GANDHI

55

helpless victim to her own dishonor. But I believe that
non-violence is infinitely superior to violence . 35

He distrusts violence because at the outset it empowers
the unreasoning mob, and in the end it exalts not the just man
but the most violent. He rejects Bolshevism, therefore, as alien
to the character and purpose of India. "It may be that in other
countries Governments may be overthrown by brute force; but
India will never gain her freedom by the naked fist ." 36 Elis
newer ideas, like the younger Nehru, are eager to arm the
Hindus and follow Russia's example; but Gandhi warns them
that a freedom based upon killing can never lead to anything
more than a change of masters. "I do not believe in short-
violent-cuts to success. Bolshevism is the necessary result of
modern materialistic civilization. Its insensate worship of
matter has given rise to a school which has been brought up
to look upon materialistic advancement as the goal, and which
has lost all touch with the final things of life ." 37

It is our good fortune, in America, that Lenin and Gandhi
do not agree, and that two great peoples, as if for our
instruction, are moving by diverse paths to kindred ends. Just
as Russia and America are rival laboratories designed, so to
speak, by the Spirit of History to test the communistic vs. the
individualistic method of production, distribution and living,
so Russia and India will be rival laboratories to test the violent
vs. the peaceful method of social revolution. Never has history
made such crucial experiments on so vast a scale, or offered
any generation, not even Christ's, so significant a spectacle.
For in India Christ is again on trial, and stands face to face
once more with Rome.

But is not non-violent resistance a vain idealist's dream?
One hears the sardonic laughter of Lenin. And Gandhi asks

in return what progress is made when one form of violence
is replaced by another, or materialistic ambition is
incorporated and nationalized at the point of a million
bayonets? "You of the West," he says, "have been taught it is
violent power which wins. The truth is that it is passive
resistance which has always won ." 38 He cites the victory of the
Christians over the Roman Empire as the classic example; and
in our own day, he thinks, the League of Nations can re-order
the world by practicing non-co-operation without violence . 39
He regretted the decision of China to fight the West with the
weapons of the West, and predicted that the only result would
be a patriotic substitution of home-made violence for foreign.
"In casting off Western tyranny it is quite possible for such a
nation to become enslaved to Western thought and methods.
This second slavery is worse than the first ." 40 Always it is
better to lose without violence than to win with it : in the one
case we sacrifice our personal will (which is a delusion); in
the other we sacrifice our distinctive humanity itself.

The West will think Ahimsa a weakling's creed, a fig-leaf
of philosophy to hide an intellectual's cowardice. Therefore,
Gandhi tells his people, India must be ready to suffer anything
in its campaign for freedom, and yet never make violent
retaliation. To blows and shots, to bombs and shells there must
be but one reply : patient refusal to deal in any way with
British merchants, British goods, or the British Government.
"Bravery on the battlefield is impossible for India, but bravery
of the soul remains open to us. Non-co-operation means
nothing less than training in self-sacrifice ." 41 It is as a brother
said to Dhan Gopal Mukerji : "Until our blood is spilt in rivers,
nothing can shake the foundation of British rule. ... We should
make a holocaust of ourselves. Even if we are beaten it will

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THE CASE FOR INDIA

cleanse India of cowardice." 42 When Hindus talk like this,
freedom is near.

IV. Christ Meets John Bull

We shall tell later the story of the Revolt of 1921 : how it
made rapid progress in unifying India with the call to liberty;
how it broke out into violence at Bombay and Chauri Chaura;
and how Gandhi, in the face of bitter criticism from his
followers, withdrew the whole movement on the ground that
it was degenerating into mob rule. Seldom in history has a
man shown more courage in acting on principle in contempt
of passing expediency and popularity. The nation was
astonished at his decision ; it had supposed itself near to
success ; and it did not agree with Gandhi that the method
was as important as the end. The reputation of the Mahatma
sank to the lowest ebb.

It was just at this point (in March, 1922) that the
Government, which had feared to touch him before,
determined upon his arrest. Charging him with sedition, it sent
soldiers to take him into custody. He made no attempt to elude
or resist them; he asked his followers to make no protests or
demonstrations ; and he declined to engage a lawyer or offer
a defense. His courtesy to all infected the Court, and the Judge
treated him in the finest tradition of English chivalry. The
Prosecutor charged him with being responsible, through his
literary campaign, for the violence that had marked the
outbreak of 1921. Gandhi's reply disturbed every precedent.
He said, quietly :

I wish to endorse all the blame that the learned
Advocate-General has thrown on my shoulder in

GANDHI

57

connection with the incidents in Bombay, Madras,
and Chauri Chaura. Thinking over these deeply, and
sleeping over them night after night, it is impossible
for me to dissociate myself from these diabolical
crimes... The learned Advocate-General is quite
right when he says that as a man of responsibility,
a man having had a fair share of education, having
had a fair share of experience of this world, I should
have known the consequences of every one of my
acts. I knew that I was playing with fire, I ran the
risk, and if I was set free, I would still do the same.
I felt this morning that I would have failed in my
duty if I did not say what I say here just now.

I wanted to avoid violence. I want to avoid violence.
Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is also
the last article of my creed. But I had to make my
choice. I had either to submit to a system which I
considered had done an irreparable harm to my
country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people
bursting forth when they understood the truth from
my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone
mad. I am deeply sorry for it, and I am therefore here
to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest
penalty. 1 do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any
extenuating act. I am here, therefore, to invite and
cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be
inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime
and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a
citizen. The only course open to you. Judge, is either
to resign your post or inflict on me the severest
penalty. 43

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GANDHI

59

The Judge expressed his profound regret that he had to
send to jail one whom millions of his countrymen considered
"a great patriot and a great leader"; he admitted that even
those who differed from Gandhi looked upon him "as a man
of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life." 44

Then he sentenced him to six years in prison. Gandhi's
son Devandas followed him on trial, freely acknowledged his
guilt of sedition, and asked for the maximum penalty. 45

Missionaries throughout India compared the proceedings
to the trial of Jesus. Universally men said that the old
question — what the world would do to Jesus should he return
to earth — had been clearly answered : it would put him into
jail. The English Bishop of Madras spoke without fear and
without equivocation : "I frankly confess, although it deeply
grieves me to say it, that I see in Mr. Gandhi the patient
sufferer for the cause of righteousness and mercy, a truer
representative of the crucified Saviour than the men who have
thrown him into prison and yet call themselves by the name
of Christ." 46

Gandhi was put under solitary confinement, but he did
not complain. "I do not see any of the other prisoners," he
wrote, "though I really do not see how my society could do
them any harm." But "I feel happy. My nature likes loneliness.
1 love quietness. And now I have opportunity to engage in
studies that I had to neglect in the outside world." 47 He
instructed himself sedulously in the writings of Bacon, Carlyle,
Ruskin, Emerson, Thoreau and Tolstoi, and solaced long hours
with Ben Jonson and Walter Scott. He read and reread the
Bhagwad-Gzta. He studied Sanskrit, Tamil and Urdu so that
he might be able not only to write for scholars but to speak to
the multitude. He drew up a detailed schedule of studies for

the six years of his imprisonment, and pursued it faithfully
till accident intervened. "I used to sit down to my books," he
said later, "with the delight of a young man of twenty-four,
and forgetting my four and fifty years and my poor health." 48

Long before the expiration of his sentence he was stricken
with appendicitis. He had often denounced Western medicine
as false and worthless; but when the British physician
recommended an operation, Gandhi offered no resistance. It
was rather the doctor who hesitated. "If you die under my
hands," he said, "every Hindu will think I killed you." Gandhi
signed a paper absolving him in advance, and the operation
proceeded to a successful conclusion. When the patient was
strong enough to leave the hospital the Government did not
send him back to jail; it released him (February 24,1924). A
vast crowd of his countrymen gathered at the gates of the
prison to welcome him, and many kissed his coarse garment
as he passed. But he shunned politics and the public eye, pled
his weakness and illness, retired to his school at Ahmedabad,
and lived there for many years in solitude with his students.

V. The Religion of Gandhi

From that retreat he sent forth, weekly, editorials to his
principal mouth-piece. Young India. Never has incidental
literature been so vital or so absorbing. From these pages we
come to know the man across our barriers of traditions and
space ; and as we read we perceive that he is not only a saint,
but also a prophet and a philosopher.

He is first of all a man of religion ; i.e., he believes it Is
better to be good than great, and that right will conquer in the
end. "Most religious men I have met are politicians in disguise.

60

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61

I, however, who wear the guise of a politician, am at heart a
religious man /' 49 He had to be : a politician, even a statesman,
could not have united India; India stands for religion, and will
follow only a saint. "My patriotism is subservient to my
religion," he says . 50 India is great and holy, but greater and
holier is truth. To this extent the nationalism vibrating in the
Indian Revolution finds no encouragement in the Oriental
Rousseau.

Nevertheless, despite his piety, he laughs at the title
Mahatma , and rejects the idea that he is a saint. "I have no
special revelation of God's will... I have no desire to found
a sect." He hoped that his arrest would rid India of "the
superstition about my possession of supernatural
powers ." 51 Doubtless other founders of religion protested
in the same way; and Gandhi himself protests to no avail.
Already peasant cottages show pictures representing him
as a reincarnation of Sri-Krishna . 52 A few centuries hence
he will be a god.

He is too tolerant to be the conscious founder of a new
religion. He is so inclined towards Christianity that his Hindu
enemies call him a "Christian in disguise ." 53 He is forever
quoting phrases from the New Testament; in one page 54 he
cites two Christian hymns; he reminds his followers that "not
every man who says T am a Congressman'" (i.e., a follower
of the revolutionary Hindu National Congress) "is such, but
only he who does the will of the Congress ." 55 The last words
of his book on Ethical Religion are taken from Christ. He has
scandalized orthodox Hindus by requiring the reading of the
New Testament in his school . 56 He accepts Christianity as a
moral doctrine, and finds no fundamental anomaly in making
it the policy of "heathen" India against "Christian" England.

"Why," he asks, "should you self-styled whites get it into
your heads that Christianity is your special largess to
distribute or interpret? You have made a mess of it yourselves.
As a matter of fact, Christ was originally an Asiatic, as
were all founders of religion, and I think we understand him
much better than you do ." 57

But just as a Hindu can be a Buddhist and a Brahminist,
or a Buddhist and a atheist, at the same time, and just as a
Chinese can be at once a Confucion, a Taoist and a Buddhist,
so Gandhi thinks it nothing strange that he should be at once
a Christian and a follower of the ancient Hindu faith. "The
world, and therefore we, can no more do without the teaching
of Jesus than we can without that of Mohammed or the
Upanishads. I hold all these to be complementary of one
another, in no case exclusive ." 58 "The spirit of the Sermon on
the Mount competes almost on equal terms with the Bhagavad-
Gita for the domination of my heart ." 59 He quotes the Golden
Rule, and then compares it with a couplet from an old Hindu
poem taught him in his childhood : "If a man gives you a drink
of water, and you give him a drink in return, that is nothing.
Real beauty consists in doing good against evil ." 60

And yet, with all his welcome to Christianity, and his co-
operation with Mohammedans, he remains a Hindu in faith
as well as in nature and philosophy. "I do not believe," he says
bravely, "in the exclusive divinity of the Vedas . I believe the
Bible, the Koran and the Zendavesta to be as divinely inspired
as the Vedas /' 61 But "nothing elates me so as the music of the
Gita , or the Ramayana of Tulsidas ." 62 Christianity is, in general,
as true as Hinduism ; but "Hinduism tells everyone to worship
God according to his own faith or Dharma, and so it lives in
peace with all religions ." 63 For him personally the religion of

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63

his own people is best, "My faith offers me all that is necessary
for my inner development, for it teaches me to pray. But I also
pray that everyone else may develop to the fullness of his
being in his own religion, that the Christian may become a
better Christian, and the Mohammedan a better
Mohammedan, I am convinced that God will one day ask us
only what we are and what we do, not the name we give to
our being and doing." 64

He has unequivocally applied this principle of tolerance
in action. For India, like America, has its religious divisions,
its Catholics called Hindu and its Protestants called
Mohammedans. Gandhi has collaborated with the Moslem
leaders in their own program, and in a combined program
for Swaraj ; he has presided at Mohammedan Congresses, as
Mohammedans have presided at the All-India National
Congress; he has worked incessantly to reduce the conflicts
between the two groups; he has even endangered his life by
a twenty-one-day fast to force Hindu and Moslem leaders to
co-operation and peace. He has denounced Hindu hatred of
Islam, and Hindu music played in processions before
Moslem mosques; 65 he has condemned, at great cost to his
popularity, the war of Hindu and Moslem periodicals in the
Punjab as "simply scurrilous"; 66 and though he has expressed
his suspicion that the Government secretly encourages these
divisions, he challenges his own followers by telling them
that "only those can be set by the cars by a third party who
are in the habit of quarreling" of themselves. 67 He carries his
confidence in the Moslems to the extent of suggesting that
they, like the Christians in India, and the Sikhs, and the
Parsees, be allowed to write into the proposed Constitution
of an autonomous India their own reservations for the

protection of their minorities. 68 Until Moslems and blind us
can agree, he says, all talk of self-rule is idle. 69 He
paraphrases the saying of an Englishman, and writes : "If we
Indians could only spit in unison, we would form a puddle
big enough to drown 300,000 Englishmen." 70 "Hindu-Moslem
unity," he preaches tirelessly, "means Sioaraj." 71

There are few things in recent Hindu history more
remarkable than Gandhi's announcement of September 18,
1924, referring to the Hindu-Moslem riots at Lucknow.

The recent events have proved unbearable for me.
My helplessness is still more unbearable. My religion
teaches me that whenever there is distress which one
cannot remove one must fast and pray. 1 have done
so in connection with my own dearest ones. Nothing,
evidently, that I say or write can bring the two
communities together. I am therefore imposing on
myself a fast of twenty-one days, commencing from
today. 72

Was it a mere piece of display ? To a certain extent display
was necessary ; the need of Hindu-Moslem unity had to be
dramatized ; an almost theatrical stimulus had to be given to
the national consciousness. Therefore Gandhi went, for the
period of his fast, to the home of a Mohammedan friend,
Maulana Mohamad Ali. For three weeks he lay quietly in bed.
taking nothing hut water. "I am not aware," he wrote later, "of
having suffered any pangs of hunger during the whole of the
fast." 73 On the twenty-sixth day leaders from both the hostile
camps met at his bedside, and issued the following statement :
The leaders here present are profoundly

moved We empower the President (of the

Conference) personally to communicate to Mahatma

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THE CASE FOR INDIA

Gandhi the solemn resolution of all those taking part,
to preserve peace ; and to announce to him our
unanimous desire that he should break his fast
immediately. . . He himself shall select the means to be
used to check the spread of the existing evil as rapidly
and effectively as possible . 74

Just as Gandhi is not shocked by Western worship of the
Virgin, or the symbolism of the Lamb, or the drama of the
Mass, so we must not be shocked at his simple acceptance of
certain elements in Hinduism which seem to us rank
superstition. As John Haynes Holmes says, "Hinduism
belongs to Gandhi as the Judaism of the first century belonged
to Jesus ." 75 Most disturbing of all these local vestiges is his
acceptance of caste. The many minor or subordinate castes
which have formed in India will, he believes, soon disappear;
but the four fundamental castes will remain, in their present
or an equivalent form, because, he thinks, they are demanded
by the natural variety and inheritance of ability and
character . 76 He does not approve of intermarriage among these
groups. To an American who questioned caste he said : "Do
you not believe in heredity? Do you not believe in eugenics?
Do you not have classes in your country ?" 77 And to the
complaint that it seemed unjust to hold a capable man through
life to a low caste into which he had been bom, he replied that
he believed in re-incarnation, and therefore relied upon
successive avatars to redress the balance : A capable Sudra, if
he lived honorably, would be re-born into a higher caste . 78
Having offended the radicals and the Westerners with this
defense of a dying institution he offends the conservatives, and
the great majority of his countrymen, by advocating the
emancipation of woman, the elimination of the disabilities

GANDHI

65

affecting widows, the abolition of child-marriage, and above
all the removal of "untouchability ." 79

In the history of the world religions there is perhaps
nothing like our treatment of the suppressed classes . 80
If the Indians have become the Pariahs of the Empire,
it is retributive justice, meted out to us by a just
God... Should we Hindus not wash our blood stained
hands before we ask the English to wash theirs?
Untouchability has degraded us, made us Pariahs in
South Africa, East Africa, Canada. So long as Hindus
willfully regard Untouchability as part of their
religion, so long Swaraj is impossible of attainment.
India is guilty. England has done nothing blacker . 81

So he announces, boldly, that self-rule is out of the
question, and undeserved, while Untouchability remains.
"There is nothing untouchable in humanity ." 82 He has adopted
an Untouchable girl as his own; a laughing little imp whose
gay prattle now rules his home . 83 And to the Untouchables he
offers the encouragement of his uncompromising program :
"You must have the right of worship in any Temple... You
must have admission to schools along with the children of
other castes, without any distinction. You must be eligible to
the highest office in the land, not excluding even that of the
Viceroy. That is my definition of the removal of
Untouchability. " 84

Let us face to the full the unpleasant elements in Gandhi's
creed. He condones idol-worship as a forgivable aid to the
imagination of a people too harassed with poverty to have
time for education ; and he accepts cordially the Hindu
reverence for the cow.

The cow to me means the entire sub-human world.

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67

Man through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity
with all that lives. Why the cow was selected for
apotheosis is obvious to me. The cow in India was the
best companion. She was the giver of plenty. Not only
did she give milk, but she also made agriculture
possible. This gentle animal is a poem of pity.
Protection of the cow means the protection of the
whole dumb creation of God. . .Cow -protection is the
gift of Hinduism to the world . 85

And then, with his characteristic courage, he turns once
more upon his own people mercilessly. "Cow-protection
should commence with ourselves. In no part of the world are
cattle worse treated than in India. I have wept to see Hindu
drivers goading their oxen with the iron points of their cruel
sticks. The half-starved condition of the majority of our cattle
is a disgrace to us ." 86

Obviously he accepts cow-protection, or the refusal to kill
cattle, as bound up with Ahimsa- non-injury to any sentient
thing. This is to Gandhi the basic idea of Hinduism, and of
all religions ; 87 without it religion is merely a holy war. "The
die is cast for me... The Hindu must cultivate either of these
two faith in God or faith in one's physical might ." 88 Ahimsa
requires belief in God; for only if the universe is governed by
Right-even though a Right which we in our caves cannot
understand — can we believe, in the face of violence on the
throne, that justice will win at last. In the end we are all actors
in the drama which God has composed; we are to God what
the characters in Shakespeare's plays were to the mind that
created them. "I believe in the absolute oneness of God, and
therefore also of humanity. What though we have many
bodies ? We have but one soul ." 89

VI. Gandhi's Social Philosophi/

It is evident that the profane secularization which
industry has brought to the West has not yet affected India ;
the typical Hindu still thinks in terms of God, while the typical
white man thinks in terms of earthly profit and loss. Gandhi
would not subscribe to the contention of the Chinese
philosopher, Hu Shih, that it is the West which is idealistic,
and the East which is materialistic ; that saving people from
poverty is as spiritual a business as the intellectual love of
God. (This phrase of Spinoza's is almost a summary of Hindu
philosophy.) Gandhi is not prepared, like Hu Shih, to welcome
industrialization, factories, railroads, armies as a necessary
price for Oriental liberation from the West. On the contrary
he abhors Western civilization; he wishes to be free not only
from England, but from that whole life of feverish industry,
in office and factory, which England was the first to invent.
He looks at the slums and militarism of Japan, and turns aside:
India must not go that way. He wonders what is the purpose
and fruit of this Western bustle and "over-production/' this
strange mechanism for concentrating wealth, in which the
rapid production of goods leads to universal depression and
poverty ; this marvellous system whereby the progress of
invention results in great fortunes among a few, and
increasing unemployment among the rest. He believes that
under this mode of life leisure is destroyed, rivalry takes
merely material forms of possession, expenditure and display,
and happiness is in the end no greater than before all the
inventions and all the wealth . 90 He writes :

The people of Europe today live in better built
houses than they did a hundred years ago. Formerly

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GANDHI

69

they wore skins, and used, as their weapons, spears.
Now they wear long trousers,... and instead of spears
they carry with them revolvers containing five or more
chambers.... Formerly, when people wanted to fight
with one another, they measured between them their
bodily strength; now it is possible to take away
thousands of lives by one man working behind a gun
from a hill . 91

This is in our day an old point, but to Gandhi it is a living
horror. He has seen the worst forms of imperialistic
exploitation in South Africa and India, and he has known at
first hand the filth and terror of war. For the pursuit of
material goods for their own sake inevitably ends in war; our
neighbor has something which would suit us well — diamond
mines in Africa, coal and iron mines in Europe, oil-wells in
Mesopotamia, markets and soil in Asia and South America for
our surplus of goods and men; sooner or later we take what
we can, and hold what we take; presently it is ours by sacred
tradition, and any attempt to put an end to the theft is a
violation of the peace of the world. What nobility can there
be in a civilization that moves so naturally to murder and
suicide, to diplomatic lies and invented atrocities, to universal
conscription and a prostituted press, to gigantic national debts,
and another war as soon as a new generation of simpletons
grows up to believe new lies, not remembering the old? Such
a civilization cannot survive; it will die in the next war, which
will be between Europe and America. The time will come
when the West will ask itself, amid the ruins, "What have we
done ?'' 92

In these errors of life-perspective the fundamental, which
vitiates Western thought throughout, is, to Gandhi, a false

conception of education. Every year the West flings upon life
a million or more graduates trained in cultural studies or
business methods, but utterly untrained in morality and
honor. Even if they are taught the Ten Commandments in
school, they see with their eyes, out of school, how well one
may get along, materially, without these Verbotens; soon they
are added to the welter of unscrupulous individuals seeking
wealth; and when they take public office they make official
life a running sore of negligence and corruption.

Gandhi's own school, the Satyagrahashram, aims on the
contrary at character first and intellect afterward; Ashram is a
place of discipline, Satyagraha is the grasping of truth. The
teachers vow themselves to absolute veracity, to hurt no living
thing, to refrain from sensual desire, to live frugally, to use
no manufactured goods from abroad, to take for themselves
nothing which they might do without ; and the pupils are
expected to learn from their example. The course for all
includes manual training, spinning, agriculture, and the
sharing of every menial task. For ten years the students are
taught and fed without charge; then they take the vows of the
teacher, or go free into life as the seed-carriers of a higher
civilization, pledged only to Ahimsa — non-violence to life.
Gandhi trusts that such Ashrams will arise everywhere in
India, rescuing Hindu youth from the de-Hinduizing
processes of the Government schools, and creating a people
with those qualities of character out of which all good things
must come , 93 and without which India may be clever and
"enlightened," but never again great.

Hardest of all to understand is Gandhi's rejection of
Western medical science. At first, he tells us, he honored the
physician, who held himself always ready to alleviate pain.

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But then he decided that medicine was the art of helping one
organ at the expense of another, that it removed effects instead
of causes, and that it generated new ills for every one it healed.
Like Plato, he would have the sufferer bear his pain, keep the
doctor away, and help nature to undertake the cure. It was
vivisection that repelled him; he brands it as "man's blackest
crime," and says : "I detest the unpardonable slaughter of
innocent life in the name of science and humanity so-called ;
and all the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood
I count as of no consequence." All this vast pharmacopoeia is
unnecessary; let men have fresh air, good water and exercise,
and eat only what grows out of the earth, and the doctors will
starve. In Utopia there will be no doctors, just as there will be
no railways, no factories, and no slums . 94

This hostility to everything Western culminates in the
rejection of modem industry. The old domestic industry,
where peasant men and women plied the spinning wheel and
the loom, and kept themselves productively busy in the winter
months, was good; but the confinement of men and women
in factories, making with machines owned by others fractions
of articles whose finished form they will never see, appears
to Gandhi a roundabout way of burying humanity in a
pyramid of shoddy goods . 95 Most machine products, he
believes, are unnecessary; the labour saved in using them is
consumed in making and repairing them; if labour is really
saved, it is of no benefit to labour, but only to capital; labour
is thrown into a panic eloquently named "technological
unemployment. " 96

Machinery is like a snake-hole, which may contain
from one to one hundred snakes... Where there is
machinery there are large cities, and where there are

large cities there are tram-cars... As long as we cannot
make pins without machinery, so long will we do
without them. The tinsel splendor of glassware we will
have nothing to do with, and we will make wicks, as
of old, with home-grown cotton, and use hand-made
earthen saucers for lamps . 97
And then the most romantic passage of all :

Man is so made by nature as to require him to
restrict his movements as far as his hands and feet will
take him.. .Railways are a most dangerous institution.
Man by their means is getting farther and farther away
from his maker... What is the good of covering great
stretches of ground at high speed ? 98

Or, as an anonymous Hindu expresses it to an
Englishman : "You have taught us to fly in the air like birds,
and to swim in the sea like fishes; but how to live on the earth
you do not yet know ." 99

What entrepreneur will solve that little problem for us?

Gandhi offers a solution.

What may be hoped for is that Europe, on account
of her fine and scientific intellect, will realize the
obvious and retrace her steps; and from this
demoralizing industrialism she will find a way out. It
will not necessarily be a return to the old absolute
simplicity. But it will have to be a re-organization in
which village life will predominate, and in which brute
and material force will be subordinated to spiritual
force . 100

The first move towards this end, he thinks, is the
restoration of the spinning wheel. "We must gradually return
to the old simplicity !" 101 What joy there is in working with our

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hands!— what music in the song of the wheel!-how many
composers have heard in its humming revolutions the spirit
of the earth! "The four hours I devote to this work are more
important to me than all the others. The fruits of my labour
lie before my eyes/' 102 But more than that; for a hundred years
now, since English manufactures destroyed the domestic
industries of India, the peasant's cottage has been idle in the
winter days; for half the year 80% of the Hindus are
unemployed through no fault of their own. 103 How well it
would be for happiness and a modest prosperity, if the Charka
could be restored to those homes, filling them with busyness
and adding to the pitifully small income of the rural family!

But this revival requires a protective tariff; the spinning
wheel cannot compete with the British machine loom; British
cloth must be kept out that Hindu Khaddar may find a sale.
Since this is impossible, because of British control of Hindu
tariffs and ports, the only recourse left to India is a voluntary
boycott of all foreign cloth. In this way $200,000,000 would be
saved to India every year. 104

So Gandhi renewed the Swadeshi movement of the old
reformer Tilak; self-production was to be added to Swaraj, self-
rule. He made the spinning of the Charka a test of membership
in the National Congress; he asked that every Hindu, even the
richest, should wear Khaddar ; if they would do that it would
give them unity, and prove them ready to stand together
against foreign domination.

The response was not universal — how could it be? The
great mass of the Hindu people cannot read; it is hard to reach
them. But by 1928 great progress had been made. The
spinners' association founded by Gandhi had 166 production
depots, and 245 sales depots, taking in $1,250,000 a year; 105

Hindu students everywhere dressed in Khaddar; distinguished
ladies abandoned their Japanese silk saris for coarse cloths
woven by themselves; prostitutes in brothels and convicts in
prison began to spin; and in many cities great feasts of the
vanities were arranged, as in Savonarola's day, at which
wealthy Hindus and great merchants brought from their
homes and warehouses all their imported cloth, and flung
them into the fire. In one day at Bombay alone, 150,000 pieces
were consumed by the flames. 106 Sceptics complained; but the
imagination of India had been aroused; the needed symbol
had come.

VII. Criticism

The outstanding feature of this social philosophy, to a
Western mind, is its typical resemblance to the romanticism
of Rousseau and the "Young Germany" of Schlegel's days.
There is the same resentment against "civilization," cities and
industries; the same longings for old idealized medieval
ways; 107 the same preference for the East as against the West,
like the Slavophilism of Dostoievski; the same zealous
nationalism and horror of foreign things; the same enthusiasm
for vernacular languages, the same revival of early
literature; 108 the same call for freedom, based upon the same
belief in the natural goodness of men. "I believe in human
nature," says Gandhi. 109 And like every romantic rebel he
enlarges his own cause to make it the cause of humanity;
through India he will liberate the world. "Swaraj, Home Rule,
is not really our goal. Our battle is really a spiritual battle...
We, the miserable outcastes of the Orient, we must conquer
freedom for all humanity." 110 When the West is sick to the

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heart of its "progress" and its prosperity, its machines and its
speed, it will turn to India to be saved.

We must not suppose, however, that all the leaders of
Hindu thought accept Gandhi's creed. The most interesting
pages of his weekly. Young India , are those in which Hindus
of every rank, from Tagore to the Untouchables, write to him,
question his views, and force him often to a precarious
defense. When these critics are finished, hardly anything
remains for a Westerner to add.

They attack his religion. They consider him not a Hindu
but a Christian; they quote his favorite book, the Bhagavad-Gita,
to show him that Hinduism counsels not non-violence but
active striking, "natural killing," for a good cause. At the Delhi
Conference a Hindu rose and said : "I oppose this non-
violence, this non-co-operation. I ask you, is it Hindu teaching?
It is not. Is it Mohammedan teaching? It is not. I will tell you
what it is. It is Christian ." 111

They attack his pacifism; lusty young revolutionists call
him a coward; politicians call him a missionary; a thousand
letters denounce his "non-violence" as playing into the hands
of an England that respects (as the Irish Revolution shows)
only bombs and guns . 112 Politics, one writer tells him, is no
field for saints; it is that everlasting struggle of group with
group which is the human correlate of the biological struggle
of species with species; and like that, it is part of the
inescapable essence of life. Gandhi has remembered
Christianity and forgotten Darwin; but life is Darwinian, not
Christian, Individuals must compete, groups must compete,
nations, alliances must compete; to reduce competition in one
of these is to increase it in the others; "conflict is the father of
all things." To this traditional pacifism, this turning away from

the competitive nature of existence, one critic traces the long
subjection and abasement of India. "If we look back," he says,
"we discover that foreign dominion over India is a terrible
revenge on the country, a revenge which life has taken on a
nation which tried to deny life ." 313 Meanwhile the younger
Nehru pours into the blood of India the iron of his
uncompromising creed — revolution without violence if
possible, with violence if necessary. If the present pacific
movement fails, without doubt violence will come.

Another twits Gandhi with dietetic inconsistencies; if
Ahimsa means non-violence to any living thing, is it not sinned
against in the plucking of any plant, in the eating of any
vegetable food ? 114 The discovery by the Hindu physicist. Sir
Jagadis Chandra Bose, that plants have a sensory system,
leaves the religious Hindu in a precarious dietetic condition;
how can he live without taking life? Although thousands of
Hindus are killed in every year by snake-bites, Gandhi
prohibits the killing of serpents. "Let us never forget," he says,
"that the serpents have been created by the same God who
created us and all other creatures... Thousands of Yogis and
Fakirs live in the forests of Hindustan amidst lions, tigers and
serpents, but we never hear of their meeting death at the hands
of these animals. . ..I have implicit faith in the doctrine that so
long as man is not inimical to the other creatures, they will
not be inimical to him ." 115

Merciless, his correspondents inform him that Ahimsa is
: Lolly unsuited to India, because the Hindus, as he admits,
• cards, and will use the doctrine as a cover, while the
. rivimedans among the population are natural fighters,

. c religion sanctifies killing for a holy cause, and finds
u causes holy. "The Ahimsa doctrine," says one, "has made

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us sneaking, snivelling cowards." 116 "Don't you think," asks
another, "that armed and conspired resistance against
something Satanic and ignoble is infinitely more befitting for
any nation... than the prevalence of effortlessness and
philosophical cowardice? I mean the cowardice which is
pervading the length and breadth of India owing to the
preaching of your theory of non-violence." 117 "Two years ago,"
Gandhi writes, "a Mussulman friend said to me in all
sincerity : T do not believe your non-violence. . .Violence is the
law of life. I would not have Swaraj by non- violence... I must
hate my enemy/ "This friend," adds Gandhi, "is an honest
man. I entertain great regard for him." 118

The critics proceed to point out the difficulties of
Satyagraha, non-co-operation. First, as regards the masses, they
cannot be kept non-violent; aroused as they must be to achieve
anything, they will soon smash and kill. Second, as regards
Hindu holders of office under the British Raj , non-co-
operation, by demanding that they resign, puts too heavy a
strain on human nature; many who did resign in the first flush
of enthusiasm or display have crept back to their sinecures; 119
and hundreds of leading Hindus, who might have supported
the demand for Home Rule, are alienated by the call for their
resignations — i.e., for what they consider the starvation of their
families. 120 So with the boycott of Government schools :
teachers who left them are now destitute, and wish they could
return; pupils who left them are flocking back. The national
schools organized to teach non-co-operating students had no
funds, and could purchase only the most primitive equipment
and the most depressing quarters; in one town with two
Government high schools each having five hundred pupils,
the one National high school has fifty. 121 The national schools

that sprang up in 1921, have, with few exceptions, died. 122 The
boycott of the courts has proved impracticable: e.g., what
could be done when officials of the National Congress
absconded with Congress funds? To which Gandhi gives
reply: "At the risk of being considered inconsistent, I have no
hesitation whatsoever in advising the Congress officials in
Orissa to take legal proceedings against the culprits for the
recovery of trust funds... The Congress has a perfect right to
break its own law in its own favour. In a well-ordered state
the maxim, 'The King can do no wrong/ has a legitimate
purpose and place." 123 It is the strangest passage in Young
India.

Above all, the critics ridicule his hostility to machinery.
"The whole world," says one, "is advancing in material
civilization, without which we shall certainly be handicapped.
It is now a settled fact that India fell a prey to Western nations
because she was wanting in scientific and material progress.
History has taught this lesson, and it cannot be overlooked." 124
Sankara Nair, Gandhi's bitterest Hindu opponent, reminds
him again and again that partial industrialization is
indispensable to the freedom of India, because freedom
requires the capacity for self-defense, and self-defense requires
wealth. 125 Gandhi answers that he is not against machinery as
such — that the spinning-wheel is itself a machine; but he is "a
determined foe of all machinery that is designed for the
exploitation of people." 126 Meanwhile fact moves on with no
regard for argument: new factories spring up every week in
Bombay, Calcutta, Ahmedabad and Madras; the Tata Brothers,
Hindus, organize one of the greatest iron companies in the
world; electric lights, trolley s-cars, railways, motor-cars, hotels,
warehouses, daily transform the scene; and the traveller

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observes that the Hindus, just emerging though they are from
the Middle Ages, drive automobiles as competently as though
they had been raised in Detroit.

Therefore Gandhi's critics laugh at the spinning-wheel,
as a vain attempt to turn time back in its flight. It will revolve
for a while, by the power of enthusiasm, poetry and
imagination, but never can the Charka compete with the
machine; sooner or later even pious Hindus will buy cloth
where it is cheapest and best. The younger reformers think no
longer of the Charka , but of a protective tariff that will promote
the development of factory industry in India. Life inevitably
moves out of the village into the city. The first flush of native
wealth will put an end to the mysticism of Khaddar. "Khaddar
is dearer than mill cloth/' writes one correspondent to Gandhi,
"and our means are poor ." 127 "The mill-owners," another
informs him, "do not hesitate to palm off fraudulent imitations
of Khaddar on the gullible public ." 128 To wTiich Gandhi
answers: "I would ask skeptics to go to the many poor homes
where the spinning-wheel is again supplementing their
slender resources, and ask the inmates whether the spinning-
wheel has not brought joy to their homes ." 129

Finally the poet-sage of India, Rabindranath Tagore,
expresses in his gentle way certain difficulties which he finds
in the program of his friend. A courteous rivalry has arisen
between the Satyagrahashram at Ahmedabad, and Tagore s
school, Santiniketan, at Calcutta. The poet speaks always with
the greatest respect of the saint, but always with careful
reservations. He finds a note of narrow nationalism in Gandhi,
and worse, an unmistakable quality of medieval reaction.
"Spin and weave! — is this the gospel of a new creative age?"
To hug the Charka to oneself, and try to step out of the

universal industrializing current of the world, to think that a
people can become great by going backward to primitive
conditions irrelevant to modern life — this again is a narrow
vision. India must move with the age, she must think not in
terms of her own oppressed people, but in terms of the
oppressed of every nation. To attempt to divide India from the
West is spiritual suicide . 130 To which Gandhi replies:

When all about me are dying for want of food, the
only occupation permissible for me is to feed the
hungry... To a people famishing and idle, the only
acceptable form in which God can dare appear is
work, and promise of food as wages. . . Everyone must
spin. Let Tagore spin like the others. Let him burn his
foreign cloths. That is the duty today. God will take
care of the tomorrow . 131

Nothing is more admirable in Gandhi than his
conscientious printing of these criticisms in his own press, and
his patient and courteous reply to all of them except Tagore's.
He knows that he is but human; there is no non-sense of
inspiration about him; he says, disarmingly: "Even if my belief
is a fond delusion, it will be admitted that it is a fascinating
delusion ." 132

And yet, he hopes, it is not a delusion. It is not a
nationalist dream: it abhors war and aggrandizement, and
trusts to establish a mode of life in which the West, weary of
haste, may find something worthy of imitation, it envisages
not India only as unhappy and oppressed, but all mankind.
He knows that non-co-operation is an imperfect thing, that the
ideal would be to co-operate with all; but today it is a
necessary discipline, forging into unity the scattered races and
villages of India; already it has awakened India from torpor

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and given it new strength . 133 He knows how frail a weapon
of the spirit non-violence is in a world bristling with guns; but
what other course is open to a country absolutely weaponless?
"You know that we are powerless / 7 he writes in an Open Letter
to All Englishmen in India , "for you have ensured our incapacity
to fight in open and honorable battle ." 134 That is a strange
phrase for Gandhi! "The British/' he writes, "want us to put
the struggle on the plane of machine-guns. They have these
weapons and we have not. Our only assurance of beating them
is to keep it on the plane where we have the weapons and they
have not. ... The way of the sword is not open to India ." 135 Yes,
violence is the law of the animal world, more and more the
strength of the spirit outweighs the power of fists and guns . 136
Ahimsa may make cowards, or offer them a philosophy of
escape; but also it makes saints of limitless bravery, who stand
up to the pikes and pistols of the oppressor without fear and
without retreat. Let the history of the Ro volution prove it! And
if India cannot attain freedom without violence, she will not,
in the judgment of Gandhi, attain it with violence.

History teaches one that those who have, no doubt
with honest motives, ousted the greedy by using brute
force against them, have in their turn become a prey
to the disease of the conquered. . .My interest in India's
freedom will cease if she adopts violent means. For
their fruit will be not freedom, but slavery . 137

VII. An Estimate

How does the man appear now, in the perspective of
these examples of his thought? Of course he is above all an
idealist, not a realist. He makes very little application of

history to the understanding of the present; he is unaware of
the careless regularity with which fate has trampled Right
under Might, and Beauty under Power; his citation of the
Christian conquest of Rome as an instance of successful non-
violent non-co-operation ignores the political and economic
factors in that "conversion" of Constantine which determined
the victory of the Church. The biological view of life is
unknown to him; he does not realize that morals and co-
operaion have been developed only to give a group coherence
and strength against competing groups. His theory of the
spinning-wheel indicates an over-simplification of this
complex and interdependent economic world; no nation can
now remain medieval and be free.

Having made this obeisance to reality, we are free to
accept and honor Gandhi for his astonishing record of
achievements. First, though leaping far ahead of the moral
consciousness of mankind, which is yet tribal arid national, he
has helped the international organization of industries and
states to prepare us for the larger morality, in which the code
of conduct between gentlemen will be-because world order
will necessitate it— applied to the conduct of nations. Second,
he has given life and meaning to a Christianity which had
become, among ourselves, mere poetry an pretense; he has
lifted it up to a plane where the most unscrupulous statesman
must reckon with it as a great force; he has ennobled it beyond
modern precedent by unconsciously attaching to its banner
one-fifth of the human race. Third, he has for a generation kept
a great revolutionary movement from all but sporadic
violence; he has refused to unleash the mob; in this way he
has been a boon to all humanity, which is so sensitive now to
disorder anywhere. He has approached one of the

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fundamental principles of statesmanship: to persuade radicals
that change must be gradual in order to be permanent, and
to persuade conservatives that change must be. Fourth, he has
educated his people: he has aroused them, as no man before
in their history, to the evils of Untouchabilitv, temple
prostitution, child-marriage, unmarriageable widows, and the
traffic in opium. Fifth, and despite his partial defense of that
caste system which perpetually divides and weakens India, he
has, by the power of imagination and the word, given to India
a psychological unity never possessed by it before, making all
these races, languages and creeds feel and think alike, as the
prelude to united action. Sixth, he has given to his countrymen
what they needed above everything else — pride. They are no
longer hopeless or supine; they are prepared for danger and
responsibility, and therefore for freedom.

If his way of thought seems alien to our skeptical and
realistic West, let us remember that our way of thought would
be maladapted and useless to the Hindus. The unifer of India
could not be a politician, he had to be a saint. Because Gandhi
thought with his heart all India has followed him. Three
hundred million people do him reverence, and no man in the
world wields so great a spiritual influence. It is a Tagore said
of him:

He stopped at the threshold of the huts of the
thousands of dispossessed, dressed like one of their
own. He spoke to them in their own language. Here
was living truth at last, and not only quotations from
books. For this reason the "Mahatma/' the name given
to him by the people of India, is his real name. Who
else has felt like him that all Indians are his own flesh
and blood? When love ee rie to the door of India

that door was opened wide... At Gandhi's call India
blossomed forth to new greatness, just as once before,
in earlier times, when Buddha proclaimed the truth of
fellow-feeling and compassion among all living
creatures . 138

Perhaps Gandhi will fail, as saints are like to fail in this
very Darwinian world. But how could we accept life if it did
not, now and then, fling into the face of our successes some
failure like this?

83

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CHAPTER THREE

THE REVOLUTION

I. Origins

It was Woodrow Wilson who started the Indian
Revolution. Did he know what he was doing when he
scattered over every land his ringing phrases about
democracy, self-government, and the rights of small nations?
In every subject country — in Egypt and the near east, in China
and India there were ears waiting for those words as the signal
to revolt. They were the voice of the Zeitgeist calling to all men
to be free. Were not the Allies winning, and destroying the last
autocracy in Europe? Was not the whole world now safe for
democracy?

Those waiting spirits, of course, had been prepared; the
ideology of liberty was not born in them over night. X oun g
Chinese, young Japanese, young Hindus had gone to Oxford
and Cambridge, to London and Manchester, to Harvard and
Columbia, to Princeton and Yale. In 1923 there were 1094
Hindu students enrolled in the schools of England. 1 They
marvelled at the privileges enjoyed by the lowliest citizens of
Europe and America; they studied the French and American
Revolutions, and read the liberal literature of reform, the
radical literature of revolt; they gloated over the Bill of Rights,
The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of
Independence, and the American Constitution; they went back
to their countries as centers of infection for democratic ideas
and the gospel of liberty. The industrial and scientific advances

of the West, and the vc: dory of the Allies rn the War, gave to
these ideas an irresistible prestige; soon every student was
shouting the battle-cry of ieeedom, In the schools of England
and America Hie Hindus Lwmed to be free.

And did Macaulay foresee, when he ordained that all
higher education had so .Tnouki use the English language,
that the Hind us would warn rvTlonahsm and democracy with
English? It ah great her -' on re, as Thomas Hardy said, is die
voice ot reason m revoig how could the young Hindu read
the liter-.! U ; w cs • ry : . d -w w - n Vneu t being corrupted
and exalted w it h the vyurution to freedom? At last the English
in India, seeing the unschiet that was brewing, forbade the
teaching of Lung. -vw • a. -.Tory of the eighteenth century in the
Indian schools. I ho T v had waited too long. 2

These Vveeke n : - .mb Orientals had not only taken on
political ideas in ves course ot their education abroad; they had
shed religious -ideas; uso gvo processes are usually associated,
in the individual and w history. They came to Europe as pious
youths, wedded \o 1 Odd ha, Krishna, Shiya, Vishnu, Kali,
Kuanyin, and wive not; they tone tied science, and their ancient
faith was shattered as il by a sudden electrical dissolution.
Shorn of religious belief, which is the very spirit of India, the
Westernized Huxley returned to their country disillusioned
and sad; a Ham sand gods had dropped dead from the skies.
They bevmne pceimisis and cynics like our own youth in the
West today; they bad nothing to believe. Inevitably Utopia
filled the place ol heaven, democracy became a substitute for
Nirvana, liberty replaced God. What had gone on in Europe
in the second half of the eighteenth century went van now in
the East.

Nevertheless the new ideas developed slowly before the

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War. In 1885 a few Hindu leaders met at Bombay and founded
the "Indian National Congress," but they do not seem at that
time to have dreamed even of Home Rule. Those leaders were
mostly of the middle and business class; they accepted British
rule in India as they accepted the behaviour of the sun; they
recognized many benefits in that rule; what they wanted was
not independence, but a share in the government, its dignities,
its powers, and perhaps its spoils. The British office-holders
could not understand this point of view; they froze the
movement with cold stares and references to the future.
Instead, the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, proclaimed, in 1905, his
intention to partition Bengal, thereby destroying the unity and
strength of the most conscious and powerful community in
India. The result was the development of a more rebel mood,
and the appearance of blunt leaders like the uncompromising
Tilak, who, at the All India National Congress of 1905,
announced to the excited delegates that India must have
Swaraj. He had created the word out of Sanskrit roots still
visible in its English translation, self-rule. Not content with
that, the old tiger threatened that if Curzon persisted in the
partition of Bengal, India would retaliate with Swadeshi , the
boycott of foreign goods. In that same eventful year Japan
defeated Russia, like another David slaying Goliath; and the
East, which for a century had been fearful of the West, took
heart, and began to think of all Asia liberating itself from the
guns of Europe. It was in 1905, then, that the Indian
Revolution began.

II. A Stroke of Politics

In its earlier stages it tended to imitate Russian methods;

bombs were exploded, shots were fired, and the "demands"
were often in inverse proportion to the strength of the rebels.
With the arrival of Gandhi in 1914, and the outbreak of the
World War, the situation changed. Gandhi, the idealist, did
not realize that the subjection of India was one root of the War;
that this had for a century determined British policy, and the
size of the British navy, as well as the size of all the navies in
the world. 4 Instead, Gandhi saw the War as an opportunity
for securing Home Rule by proving the absolute loyalty of
India to England. From the beginning to the end of the Great
Madness he supported the Allies, and India followed him.

She contributed at once $500,000,000 to the fund for
prosecuting the War; she contributed $700,000,000 later in
subscriptions to war loans; and she sent to the Allies various
products to the value of $1,250,000,000. 5 The suspension of the
Revolutionary movement enabled England to reduce the
Indian army to 15,000 men. 6 The total number of Hindus who
were persuaded, often by means amounting to compulsion,
to fight for England in the war, was 1,338,620, being 1,78,000
more than all the troops contributed by the combined
Dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New
Zealand. 7

None of the Hindu soldiers was granted a commission,
however brave he might have proved himself to be. 8 Yet they
gave a good account of themselves in France, in Palestine, in
Syria and Mesopotamia; a British historian speaks of "the
brilliant performances of the Indian contingent sent to France
in 1914 at a critical time in the Great War"; 9 and some say that
it was the Hindu troops who first turned back the Germans
at the Marne. 10 Indian soldiers were sent even to China to fight
unwillingly against their Asiatic brothers; the Legislature at

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Delhi questioned the Government about this, but the
Government refused to answer. 11 It has been one of the many
misfortunes of the Hindus, who are called unfit for self-
defense, that they have been considered admirable military
material to fight for any others except themselves.

Never had a colony or a possession made so great a
sacrifice for the master country. Every Hindu conscious of
India looked forward hopefully now, as a reward for this
bloody loyalty, to the admission of his country into the
fellowship of free dominions under the English flag. Indeed,
in 1917, when the position of England in the War was critical,
and enthusiasm for the cause of democracy needed
stimulation, Mr. Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India,
made the following announcement in the House of Commons:
The policy of His Majesty's Government, with
which the Government of India are in complete
accord, is that of the increasing association of
Indians in every branch of the administration and
the gradual development of self-governing
institutions with a view to the progressive
realization of responsible government in India as an
integral part of the British Empire. They have
decided that substantial steps in this direction
should be taken as soon as possible, and that it is
of the highest importance as a preliminary to
considering what these steps should be that there
should be a free and informal exchange of opinion
between those in authority at home and in India. His
Majesty's Government have accordingly decided,
with Elis Majesty's approval, that I should accept the
Viceroy's invitation to proceed to India to discuss

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the matters with the Viceroy and the Government of
India, to consider with the Viceroy the views of local
Governments, and to receive with him the
suggestions of representative bodies and others.

I would add that progress in this policy can only be
achieved by successive stages. The British Government
and the Government of India, on whom the
responsibility lies for the welfare and advancement of
the Indian peoples, must be judges of the time and
measure of each advance, and they must be guided by
the co-operation received from those upon whom rlew
opportunities of service will thus be conferred and by
the extent to which it is found that confidence can be
reposed in their sense of responsibility.

Shortly thereafter Mr. Montagu visited India, and in
collaboration with the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, drew up the
"Reforms" known by their names. The Secretary wished to
carry out his promises liberally, but the Viceroy proved to be
an obstinate conservative; 12 these things might do, he said, a
generation or two hence. Nor did the Government in London
encourage Montagu; the War over, it regretted his promise
and sought devices and phrases that would break it while
seeming to keep it. Lloyd George, then Premier, declared with
unstatesman like clarity that Britain intended always to rule
India, that there must always remain in India a "steel frame"
of British power and British dominance. 13 Some time
previously. Lord Curzon had written: "British rule of the
Indian people is England's present and future task; it will
occupy her energies for as long a span of the future as it is
humanly possible to forecast." 14 And Lord Birkenhead was to
say, in 1925: "I am not able in any foreseeable future to discern

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91

a moment when we may safely, either to ourselves or India,
abandon our trust/' 15 The last word observed the best
traditions of imperialistic hypocrisy.

Therefore the reforms fell far short of what Montagu had
hoped for. They established, first, the system of "Dyarchy,"
by which each province would have two ministries, one
responsible to the provincial legislature, and having no powers
of any account, the other responsible only to the British
authorities, and having all the fundamental powers. 16 Any act
of the provincial legislature could be overruled by the
Governor, and any act of the Governor, if he considered it
necessary to the interests of the Empire, could be passed by
decree over the heads of the legislature. 17

A similar arrangement castrated the Central Assembly;
here too the only right was to speak; all authority remained
with the Viceroy. He was empowered to enact any measure
which might seem necessary to him, even if it must be over a
unanimous adverse vote of the Assembly; he could collect
taxes which the Assembly had refused to vote; he controlled
the expenditures, taxation and defense, and was free to pay
salaries and pensions denied by the Assembly. When this
remarkable form of progressive self-government reached
England, a member of Parliament, Dr. Rutherford, said of it:
"Never in the history of the world was such a hoax
perpetrated upon a great people as England perpetrated upon
India, when in return for India's invaluable service during the
War, we gave to the Indian nation such discreditable,
disgraceful, undemocratic, tyrannical constitution." 18

The Tories 19 have answered that it would have been
unwise to give more power to legislatures elected by so
illiterate a people — forgetting that one-fifth of the Assembly,

and one-half of the upper house, the Council of State, were
named by the British Government; that the lower house was
elected by a franchise open to one out of two hundred and
fifty in the population, and the Council was (half) elected by
a franchise still further whittled down. Finally, the voters were
divided into sectarian groups — Hindus, Moslems, Christians,
Europeans, etc., they were given representation bearing little
relation to their numbers; and each candidate presented
himself not to all the citizens in his community, but only to
his fellow-sectarians. As Josiah Wedgwood, then a Member of
Parliament, said of the Reforms, "The very idea of India
vanished from the Bill, to be replaced by the disunited
communities of Hindu, Muslims, Sikh, Mahratta, Brahmin,
non-Brahmin, Indian Christian, Anglo-Indian, and English/' 20
It was claimed that such a plan was necessary to protect the
Moslems from the Hindus, who outnumber them almost five
to one; in practice, however, it is the Hindus who need
protection from the Moslems. The actual result was the
increasing division of India into a score of hostile groups.

It was a result admirably suited to an alien ruler, who
no doubt had not intended it. It is only a coincidence that Lt.-
Col. John Coke, Commandant at Moradabad, advised the
British Government, shortly before it took over India from the
Company: "Our endeavors should be to uphold in full force
the (for us fortunate) separation which exists between the
different religions and races, not to endeavor to amalgamate
them. Divide et impera should be the principle of Indian
Government"; to rule your subjects, divide them. It was
another coincidence that the British Governor of Bombay, in
1859 , sent to his Government this word of counsel: " Divide et
impera was the old Roman motto, and it should be ours." It

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92

was also a coincidence that Sir John Strachchey wrote: "'The
existence, side by side, of hostile creeds among the Indian
people is one of the strong points in our political position in
India ," 21 A government must not be held responsible for the
inadvertent honesty' oi its representatives.

Against the Reforms no Hindu could do anything except
protest by tongue or pen. But that was a right not guaranteed
to him; the Reforms "did not insure to the Hindus freedom
of speech, or of assembly, or of the press; or the right of trial
in open court; or the privilege of habeas corpus; or any other
of the essential rights and privileges which are the foundations
and indispensable guarantees of liberty, justice, and law." 22
W hen protests were tried , and the Hindu press began to voice
its suspicion that India had been deceived, the Government
at Delhi issued, in 1919, the Rowlatt Acts, re-imposing upon
India all those restrictions of assembly, press and speech that
had been in effect during the War. The Acts proclaimed that
hereafter the Government might arrest without notice or
warrant any suspected person, and detain him without trial
as long as it liked; that such trial as might be given was to be
in secret, before not a jury but three judges appointed by the
Government; that the accused need not be told, the names of
his accusers, nor of the witnesses against him; that these
should not be required to confront him; that the accused must
not be allowed the right of engaging a lawyer to defend him;
that he must not call witnesses in his behalf; that usual legal
procedures might be abrogated; and that no appeal would be
permitted 23 An Indian scholar showed that these were almost
precisely the rules of the Spanish Inquisition. 24 The Acts were
later repealed.

III. A Whiff of Grapeshot

The last blow was the massacre of Amritsar. Since all
news of this event remained hidden from the world, and even
from Parliament, for several months after its occurrence, and
since this slaughter was the proximate cause of the Revolution
of 1921, let us inquire into the details. In the now famous city
of the Punjab, meetings were held to protest against the
Rowlatt Acts; and on March 30 th and April 6 th , 1919, hartals
were successfully declared — all business in the city stopping
throughout those days as a sign of popular dissatisfaction with
the Government. "There was no disorder," says an English
clergyman resident in India, "and Europeans passed
unmolested among the crowds." 25 It was a fine sample of
"non-violent non-co-operation. "

On the 9 th of April the Government arrested Drs.
Kitchlew and Satyapal, who had addressed the protest
meetings. When word of this spread, a great crowd poured
into the streets; part of it tried to force its way through the
police lines to register with the Deputy Commissioner their
protest against the arrest of the leaders. Some in the crowd
threw stones at the police; the police answered with bullets
and ten men were killed. Infuriated by the sight of these dead,
the crowd lost all order, destroyed property, and killed five
Englishmen. A woman missionary was set upon and beaten,
but was carried to safety by some Hindus. Indians of
education tried to pacify the crowd, but failed. Indian officers
in the city volunteered their services to the Government. 26

On the 10 th and 11 th , 600 troops arrived; on the 12 th
Brigadier-General Dyer came, and took command. By that day
quiet had been restored, and such crowds as gathered were

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95

peaceably dispersed. General Dyer made several arrest; and
on the 13 th he summoned the people by call of drums, and had
read to them a proclamation forbidding them to leave the city
without a pass, or to organize processions, or to gather in
groups of more than three. Meanwhile 10,000 Hindus from
outlying districts, who had little if any knowledge of this
proclamation, collected in the enclosure known as Jalianwala
Bagh, and proceeded to celebrate a religious festival. 27 The
Bagh was an extinct garden, and surrounded with high walls
on every side, and entered by a few narrow passages.

Informed of this meeting. General Dyer proceeded to the
spot with a detachment of troops equipped with Lewis
machine-guns and armored cars. Entering the Bagh, he saw
the crowd, and concluded that it had met in violation of his
orders. Without giving the slightest warning, or affording the
assemblage any opportunity to indicate its pacific intentions,
he ordered his troops to fire upon the imprisoned mass; and
though the crowd made no resistance, but shouted its horror
and despair and pressed in panic against the gates, the General
ordered the firing to continue until all the ammunition the
soldiers had brought with them was exhausted. He personally
directed the firing towards the exits where the crowd was
most dense; "the targets," he declared, were "good." 28 The
massacre lasted for over ten minutes. When it was over, 1500
Hindus were left on the ground, 400 of them dead. 29 Dyer
forbade his soldiers to give any aid to the injured, and by
ordering all Hindus off the streets for twenty-four hours,
prevented relatives or friends from bringing even a cup of
water to the wounded who were piled up in the field. 30

A reign of official terror followed. General Dyer issued
an order that Hindus using the street in which the woman

missionary had been beaten should crawl on their bellies; if
they tried to rise to all fours, they were struck by the butts of
soldiers' guns. He arrested 500 professors and students and
compelled all students to present themselves daily for roll-
calls, though this required that many of them should walk
sixteen miles a day. He had hundreds of citizens, and some
school-boys, quite innocent of any crime, flogged in the public
square. He built an open cage, unprotected from the sun, for
the confinement of arrested persons; other prisoners he bound
together with ropes, and kept in open trucks for fifteen hours.
He had lime poured upon the naked bodies of Sadhus (saints),
and then exposed them to the sun's rays that the lime might
harden and crack their skin. He cut off the electric and water
supplies from Indian houses and ordered all electric fans
possessed by Hindus to be surrendered, and given gratis to
the British. Finally he sent airplanes to drop bombs upon men
and women working in the fields. 31

The news of this barbaric orgy of military sadism was
kept from the world for half a year. A belated commission of
inquiry appointed by the Government rendered an equivocal
report. A committee appointed by the Indian National
Congress made a more thorough investigation and reported
1,200 killed, and 3,600 wounded 32 General Dyer was censured
by the House of Commons, exonerated by the House of Lords,
and was retired on a pension. Thinking this reward
insufficient, the militarists of the Empire raised a fund of
$150000 for him and presented him with a jeweled sword of
honor. 33

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IV. The Revolt of 1921

When he heard of Amritsar, Tagore wrote the following
letter to the Viceroy, enclosing the knighthood which had been
conferred upon him by the British government.

The enormity of the measures taken by the
Government in the Punjab for quelling some local
disturbances has, with a rude shock, revealed to all
minds the helplessness of our position as British
subjects in India. The disproportionate severity of the
punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people,
and the methods of carrying them out, we are
convinced, are without parallel in the history of
civilized Governments, barring some conspicuous
exceptions recent and remote. Considering that such
treatment has been meted out to a population
disarmed and resourceless by a power which has the
most terribly efficient organization for destruction of
human lives, we must strongly assert that it can claim
no political expediency, far less moral justification.

The accounts of insults and sufferings undergone by
our brothers... have trickled through the gagged
silence, reaching every corner of India, and the
universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of
our people has been ignored by our rulers — possibly
congratulating themselves for imparting what they
imagined a salutary lesson.

The time has come when badges of honor make our
shame glaring in the incongruous context of
humiliation, and I, for my part, wish to stand shorn
of all special distinct!* vn by the side of my countrymen.

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who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to
suffer a degradation not fit for human beings. 34

At the same time Gandhi sent a similar letter to the
Viceroy, returning the decorations he had received for services
to the Empire in Africa and during the War. On November
4 th the National Congress at Delhi, at his suggestion, issued a
call for peaceful mass civil disobedience: i.e., for boycott of all
British goods, the refusal of all taxes, and the abandonment
of all forms of association or co-operation between Hindus and
the Government. The British Government thought to mollify
resentment by having the Prince of Wales come to India. But
when the Prince arrived at Bombay, on November 17 th , the city
declared a hartal , or closing of all business, and left the heir
to 320,000,000 Hindus to face empty streets and shut windows.
Only the English and a few ambitious Parsee merchants
appeared. When the people heard of these latter recalcitrants,
they poured out from their hovels and with the
characteristically uncontrolled and multiplying rage of the
crowd, set fire to the homes of the merchants, and killed fifty-
three men. 35

Gandhi, at Ahmedabad, heard the news with dismay;
could it be that his people were as brutal as the British? He
rushed to Bombay, and told the crowd, which had greeted him
with wild applause, that they had committed an outrage that
almost lowered them to the level of General Dyer.

He went back to his Ashram a disillusioned man; his
people were not prepared for a pacific revolution; like the rest
of humanity, they were still too near the beast. He fasted and
prayed, and was encouraged to learn that the Prince had
found Calcutta a dead city — that there the hartal had been
carried out with unanimity, and without violence. But at

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99

Moplah in the south, and Chauri Chaura, in the north, came
two of the blackest events of the first revolt.

The divisions between Moslems and Hindus had
suddenly become more violent than before. The revival of
Hinduism by Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and the Arya-
Somaj, had widened the gap between the rival sects.
Reactionary Hindus played music before mosques, which are
not intended to hear music; in some parts of India they classed
Moslems with Untouchables; since the Prophet had forbidden
the charging of interest, many Mohammedans were in debt
to Hindu usurers; the Moslems disapproved of graven images
of deity, the Hindus filled the streets with them; the Moslems
believed in but one god, and buttoned their coats to the left;
the Elindus believed in a thousand gods, and buttoned their
coats to the right. 36 From 1923 to 1927 the riots between these
two schools of theology cost 450 lives and 5,000 injuries. 37

The bloodiest of these disagreements occurred at Moplah,
on the Malabar coast in the south of India, in August,1921. The
Moplahs were simple Moslems who believed that every
murdered Hindu was pleasing in the sight of God. Angered
by the British treatment of the Mohammedans in the Near
East, they rose against the local officials of the Government,
and killed seven of them. Ashamed of their moderation, and
finding no other whites to hand, they turned upon the Hindus
(to whom they owed money), butchered huiadreds of them,
and circumcised other hundreds of them, male and female. 38
And at Chauri Chaura, in February, 1922, twenty-seven police
who had tried to stop a Nationalist procession were attacked,
driven into their barracks, and burned to death. 39 The
Government retaliated for these acts of violence by arresting
250,000 men and women. 40

Gandhi now performed an act of moral courage hardly
paralleled in history. He had been empowered by the last
National Congress to begin and to end non-co-operation when
he should think best. He knew now that many elements in the
revolutionary movement secretly rejoiced in the violence at
Chauri Chaura and Bombay — the Hindus had proved that
they were not cowards; they too could kill. He knew that these
younger leaders had no faith in revolution by peace, but were
anxious to come to violent grips with the enemy; and he
suspected that they looked upon these outbursts of the Hindus
as the first events in a successful violent revolution.

But he did not believe that a violent revolution could ever
be successful. He had made up his mind that he would rather
fail without violence than win with it. He astonished all India,
and all England, by issuing instructions to Nationalists
everywhere that the non-co-operation movement was to be
abandoned at once. A cry of protest came from hundreds of
his subordinates; they could not understand. They were
convinced that their leader had ruined the Revolution.

And yet that brief revolt had accomplished things
hitherto considered impossible, A people over-given to
meditation and prayer, too immersed in other worlds, too
ready to accept slavery as Maya — a superficial matter of no
importance or reality — had been persuaded, even too
suddenly, to turn their thoughts to the earth. A nation which
many had looked upon as exhausted and finished had risen
like a lusty youth. A people without patriotism and without
national consciousness, because divided into a hundred
provinces, languages, races, and creeds, had been welded into
unprecedented unity. The Hindus stiffened a little, and began
to look their masters in the face; the English bent a little, and

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101

became more attentive to their serfs. It was evident to all that
the Revolution had but begun.

V. Between Revolutions

The influence of Gandhi might have been destroyed by
his self-denying ordinance, had not the authorities arrested
him soon after its announcement. Now, though his authority
had fallen with the leaders, it rose with the people; they hailed
him as a martyr and a saint, and put his pictures in their huts
along with images of the gods. One poster circulated by his
followers showed him as the unchallenged center of a group
composed also of Buddha, Krishna, Christ, Tolstoi, Lenin, and
McSwiney. 41

When, in 1924, Gandhi was released, he found his power
broken. A new set of leaders had arisen who called themselves
the Swaraj Party, and aimed to secure Home Rule through
participation in, and legal political capture of, the Government.
Those who understood the English smiled at this; but Gandhi
was so weakened by failure, fasting, imprisonment and an
operation, that he gave a mild consent to the new policy, and
retired for years into the obscurity of his Ashram.

The new guides of India were of many kinds. There was
Chita Ranjan Das, head of the Swarajists ; a man of passionate
devotion who gave every ounce of his strength to the
movement and died of overwork in the prime of life. He
thought the Charka romantic, and yet feared the possibility that
Hindu freedom might be merely a change from foreign to
domestic exploiters; he dreaded the development of the
factory systems in India, and hoped that industry might be
spread out through the villages, and its ownership distributed

to the point where it would lack the power to dominate the
Government. 42 He was an ardent Moderate. "We want to
remain within the Empire," he said, "if that is not inconsistent
with establishing our own system of government. It is only the
lack of vision in the British policy which is driving some of
our young men to think of going outside of the Empire." 43

The older leaders, like Mrs. Annie Besant, an
Englishwoman who had lived in India since 1893, became
more cautious with every gray hair, and while calling for
Home Rule, insisted that the approach to it should be not
merely peaceful, but fully in accord with law. Great barristers
like Madan Mohan Malaviya, Motilal Nehru, and Vallabhai
Patel, who became President of the Assembly at Delhi, exerted
their influence to keep the movement within the bounds of
law. But the younger Nehru, Jawaharlal, destined to be one
of the major leaders in 1930, refused to commit himself to the
avoidance of violence; laws made by alien tyrants were not
to be respected as laws. A small circle of Communists looked
to Russia as a model; a fraction of the industrial workers in
the city organized long strikes; and these two groups formed
a red fringe on the Nationalist movement. Picturesque as any
was Sarojini Naidu, representative of the liberated minority
among the women of India; poetess and revolutionary, and
fiery orator. See her inflaming with her wild spirit the National
Congress which had elected her President:

Come, my General, come, my soldiers! I am only a
woman, only a poet. But as a woman I give to you the
weapons of faith and courage, and the shield of
fortitude. And as a poet, I fling out the banner of song
and sound, the bugle-call to battle. How shall I kindle
the flame which shall waken you men from slavery? 44

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VI. The Simon Commission

Into this cauldron of souls came the Simon Commission.
The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms had been tentative; and the
British Parliament had arranged to send a commission of
inquiry to India, after a decade of the Reforms, to report on
their operation, their success or failure, and their possible
improvement. The Commission, appointed by a Conservative
ministry, consisted of three Conservatives, two Liberals, and
two Labor members of Parliament. They sailed for India in
January, 1928.

The Hindus had looked forward to this Commission as
promising to uncover, for the British people, the defects of the
Reforms, and the practical enslavement of India. They were
astounded to find that no Hindu had been appointed to its
membership. They felt that they could not look for a
sympathetic understanding of their situation from men all of
them English, most of them conservative, and all of them
profiting, indirectly, from the British control of Indian finances
and Indian trade. The Hindu leaders, of all groups and sects,
announced that so far as they had influence, India would
boycott this Commission; they would not lend themselves to
the farce of being judged by their enemies.

When the Commission landed at Bombay, on Febrary
3 rd . 1928, it found the city flying everywhere black flags as a
sign of mourning; business was suspended, the shop -windows
were shuttered, and the Hindu-owned newspapers had
stopped publication for the day. Sir John Simon attempted to
undo the mischief by issuing, on his arrival, an invitation to
the Indian Assembly to appoint from its membership an
"Indian Central Committee" to sit with the Simon Commission

on its second visit to India. Some Moderates responded, but
India paid no attention to them. Wherever the Commission
went it was ignored by all those elements in India which
desired freedom; and on its appearance great hartals were
declared in the cities. At the end of March it left India.

It returned in October, 1928, and remained until April,
1929. The boycott still continued. The report of the
Commission, to which the liberals of the world had looked for
some solution of the problem — how India might be free and
yet remain content within the Empire, accepting the
compromises necessary to avert a panic in British industry and
trade — appeared in 1930, and was received with an amazed
disappointment throughout the world. It was made evident,
as the "Survey" of surface phenomena was followed by
"Recommendations" which were less liberal than the
Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, that the Commission had been
unable to rise above a natural resentment at its reception to a
sympathetic view of India as, in basic fact, under the heel of
England; and that the Conservatives had tried to use the
Commission to tighten their grip upon India. It became
necessary for the MacDonald Government to exclude all
members of the Commission from the Round Table
Conference of English and Hindus which had been called for
October, 1930. Observers in India agreed that the work of
MacDonald and Lord Irwin in pacifying India had been made
far more difficult by the Simon Report.

The essence of the Report, so surrounded with historical
and argumentative minutise that only political experts
recognize it as fundamental, is the recommendation that the
Central Legislature should be elected no longer by the people,
but by the provincial legislatures; that the powers of this

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105

"Federal" Assembly should be severely reduced to leave each
province almost independent of the central government; and
that the power of the provincial governors, and of the Viceroy,
should remain as broad as before.

This subtle proposal for the further disunion of India is
coated with a suggestion that the franchise for the election of
the provincial legislatures shall be extended from the 3% of
the population now permitted to vote, to 10%. 45 It suggests
that in addition to the property qualification now attached to
the franchise, an educational requirement shall be added. (If
a certain minimum of education had been made the sole test,
it would have been a very fair proposal; however it would
have had the disastrous effect of filling the legislatures with
men devoted to freedom.) Communal elections are to be
continued; 46 it is true that they might be replaced, as in
America, by constitutional safeguards against the oppression
of religious minorities; but they are now more indispensable
than ever to the disunity of India. The system of "Dyarchy"
is to be abolished, and the security which it guaranteed to
British interests will be protected by the "Over-riding Powers
of the Governor." The Governor of each province is not to be
elected, of course; he is to be appointed by the British
authorities, and he is to remain free to over-rule his legislature
whenever this seems to him necessary. 47

The Federal Assembly is to consist of two houses, to each
of which the Viceroy will appoint a substantial proportion of
its membership. The ratio of Hindus to the British in the Indian
Civil Service is not to be raised 48 The Federal delegates will
be responsible not to the people, but to the provincial
legislatures. Their membership is to include representatives
from the seven hundred Native States, 49 for these, being under

native autocrats, do not want Home Rule in India. The Viceroy
has the privilege, as before, of over-ruling the Assembly
whenever, in his judgment, the interests of the British Empire
are affected. 50 Since India is subject to invasion from without,
and sectarian disorders within, like America, its army must
remain, "at any rate for a long time to come," under "the
control and direction... of agents of the Imperial
Government." 51 This is obvious; for if the Indian army should
be under the control of the country which provides nearly all
of its soldiers and all of its funds, the relations between
England and India would have to be friendly.

VII. 19 30

In December, 1928, the All-India National Congress held
a fateful meeting at Calcutta. It had now a dues-paying
membership of 510,278, and an attendance of 15,000 men and
women from every section of India. Shortly before, the
Viceroy, Lord Irwin, had sought to appease discontent by
promising India Home Rule in the future; but as this was no
more than Mr. Montagu had promised eleven years back, the
Hindu leaders returned his note as being worthless without a
date. Sick of these vague references to the future — promises
apparently made in the hope that "things would blow over" —
the Congress of Calcutta served notice that unless dominion
status were granted to India by the end of 1929, placing her
on an equality with Canada, South Africa, Australia and New
Zealand, the members of the Congress pledged themselves to
inaugurate, on January 1, 1930, a movement for complete
independence. If India could not be treated like Canada it
would seek freedom like the United States. Gandhi pled with

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the Congress to make the interval two years instead of one; it
refused; and he accepted its decision.

On New Year's Day of 1930 the National Congress met
at Lahore. It observed that the Government had made no
advance toward the liberation of India, except to announce,
on November 1, 1929, that Great Britain proposed to call a
Round Table Conference to discuss a new constitution for
India. Asked if the new constitution would give dominion
status. Lord Irwin had replied that it was the intention of His
Majesty's Government to give India dominion status
"ultimately." The Congress expressed its understanding of this
word by empowering Gandhi and an Executive Committee to
declare, at their discretion, the opening of the campaign for
freedom. After an interval of modest retirement, Gandhi had
been accepted once more as the leader of India.

On March 6 th , he called the Indian people to another trial
of Satyagraha and Ahimsa — civil disobedience without violence;
and he wrote to the Viceroy explaining his action.

Before embarking on civil disobedience,... I would
fain approach you and find a way out. I cannot
intentionally hurt anything that lives, much less fellow
human beings. . .While therefore I hold British rule a
curse, I do not intend to harm a single Englishman or
any legitimate interest he may have in India. . .1 do not
consider Englishmen in general to be worse than any
other people on earth. I have the privilege of claiming
many Englishmen as my dearest friends... Why do I
regard British rule as a curse? It has impoverished the
dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation
and by the ruinously expensive military and civil
administration which the country cannot afford. It has

reduced us politically to serfdom.

The Viceroy replied very briefly:

His Excellency ...regrets to learn that you
contemplate a course of action which is clearly bound
to involve violation of the law and danger to the public
peace.

On March 12 th Gandhi began his "march to the sea." He
stopped at villages on the way and instructed the people not
to pay the salt tax, which weighed so heavily upon the
millions. On April 16 th he reached the coast, and made salt by
evaporating ocean water, thus violating a Government
monopoly. On the 9 th two of his sons were arrested. On the
14 th , the younger Nehru, President of the National Congress,
was arrested for manufacturing salt, and Sen Gupta, Mayor
of Calcutta, was imprisoned for sedition. On May 3 rd Gandhi
was for the second time sent to jail.

Meanwhile the people were showing heroism hardly
precedented in history. At Peshawar, on April 23 rd , a crowd
gathered in protest against the arrest of local Nationalist
leaders. The official reports of what followed stated that
twenty people were killed in a riot. The report of Abdul
Kasuri, President of the Punjab Provincial Congress
Committee, was smuggled through the censorship. As its
simple story proceeds, these distant things cease to be phrases,
and become realities of flesh and flowing blood.

There had been absolutely no disorder, and not the
least cause given to the authorities to fear that there
would be any. ..The crowd had been behaving
throughout in an exemplary manner.

While the crowd was returning towards the city,
two armored cars full of soldiers came from behind

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without blowing the horn or giving any notice
whatever of their approach, and drove into the crowd
regardless of consequences. Many people were
brutally run over, several were wounded, and at least
three died on the spot. In spite of the provocation, the
crowd still behaved with great restraint.

At this time an English officer on a motorcycle came
dashing past. As to what happened to him it is not
quite clear. There are two conflicting versions. The
semi-Government version says that he fired into the
crowd, and one of the persons who was wounded by
the shot struck him on the head and he died. The other
version... is that he collided with the motor car.

At the same time one of the armored cars caught
fire. . . It is alleged on the one hand that it was set fire
to by the mob; the other version is that it caught fire
accidentally. . . A troop of English soldiers had reached
the spot, and without any warning, began firing into
the crowd, in which there were women and children.

Now the crowd gave a good example of the lesson
of non-violence that had been instilled into them.
When those in front fell down wounded,.. .those
behind came forward with their breasts bared and
exposed themselves to the fire... Some people got as
many as twenty-one bullet wounds in their
bodies... All the young people stood their ground
without getting into a panic. A young Sikh boy came
and stood in front of a soldier and asked him to fire
at him, which the soldier unhesitatingly did, killing
him. Similarly, an old woman, seeing her relations and
friends being wounded, came forward, was shot, and

fell down wounded. An old man with a four-year old
child on his shoulders advanced, asking the soldier to
fire at him. He was taken at his word and he also fell
down wounded. Scores of such instances will come
out on further inquiry.

The crowd kept standing at the spot... and were
fired at from time to time until there were heaps of
dead and dying lying about. The Anglo-Indian paper
of Lahore, which represents the official view, wrote to
the effect that the people came forward one after
another to face the firing, and when they fell wounded
they were dragged back and others came forward. This
state of things continued from 11 o'clock to 5 P.M.

Two facts are noteworthy... There was not one
single instance where there was the mark of a bullet
at the back... Neither the police not the military nor
anybody else alleges that there was any stick or
weapon, blunt or sharp, with the persons in the crowd,
nor were any wrenched from any person by the
authorities.

At this stage it is very difficult to say what is the
number of the dead and wounded. This much seems
most likely, that the number of the dead is in
hundreds, and a careful study of the situation seems
to disclose this incident to be a repetition of the
Jalianwala Bagh massacre. 52

At Dharasana the Satyagrahi, or revolutionists pledged to
peace, expressed the feeling of India that a vital necessity like
salt should not be taxed, by attempting to walk up to the salt
pans and carry away what they needed. It was a little illogical,
for they do not seem to have offered any payment. The police.

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solid Hindus from Surat under British officers, did their best
to repel the advance without violence; they held great bamboo
sticks or lathis , six feet long with steel knobs on the ends, over
the heads of the vanguard, and threatened them* When the
advance persisted, the police struck. The revolutionists made
no resistance, but continued to approach the police until their
front ranks fell unconscious from repeated blows. A corps of
stretcher-bearers had come prepared, and while these carried
away the fallen, the second rank advanced to the police,
without raising an arm or carrying any weapon. They too were
struck on the head, in the abdomen, and in the face, until they
fell. This continued for hours, till hundreds lay unconscious
and bleeding on the ground, on stretchers, or in neighboring
homes. Mr. Webb Miller, European News Manager of the
United Press, an eyewitness, writes:

In eighteen years of reporting in twenty-two
countries, during which I have witnessed innumerable
civil disturbances, riots, street-fights and rebellions, I
have never witnessed such harrowing scenes as at
Dharasana. The Western mind can grasp violence
returned by violence, can understand a fight, but is, I
found, perplexed and baffled by the sight of men
advancing coldly and deliberately and submitting to
beating without attempting defense. Sometimes the
scenes were so painful that I had to turn away
momentarily.

One surprising feature was the discipline of the
volunteers. It seemed they were thoroughly imbued
with Gandhi's non-violence creed. 53

At Bombay, on June 19 th and 21 st , this strange capacity
to suffer without striking back, as a mute sign of India's new

pride and resolution, was demonstrated again. Orderly
battalions of Satyagrahi, men and women, marched up in
succession to Maidan Esplanade to hold a meeting forbidden
by the government, and allowed themselves to be beaten
down unconscious by the Mahratti police. Powerful Sikhs,
armed with great swords, joined with these Satyagrahis, and,
refusing to defend themselves, allowed their heads to be
beaten until they fell to the ground with blood streaming from
their mouths. 54 No one in India had thought that this war-like
race would accept the counsels of Gandhi. These were scenes
unknown in history since the Coliseum; it was as if the
primitive Christians were once again fighting with silent
suffering against an oppressive Rome.

Throughout these pitiful massacres one could still
sympathize with the police. They had been told to prevent a
violation of the "law"; they could not be expected to
distinguish between law made by the representatives of India,
and law imposed upon 320,000,000 Hindus by a few invading
foreigners; they only knew how to obey. "They seemed
reluctant to strike. It was noticeable that when the officers
were occupied on other parts of the line the police slackened,
only to resume threatening and beating when the officers
appeared again.'' 55 But in many cases the brutality without
which no man would be allowed to be a policeman in India
appeared in the most repulsive forms. One eyewitness reports:
"The police snatch off the men's garments, twist and squeeze
the testicles, and even batter them until their victims foam at
the mouth and become unconscious/' 56 This incredible story
is corroborated by another witness apparently above
suspicion. On June 12 th Miss Madeline Slade, an English-
woman of high standing, daughter of an Admiral in the British

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Navy, printed in Gandhi's weekly. Young India, the following
account of what she had seen at Dharasana — items either not
included in the United Press report or expunged from it by
the censor:

During these days when the authorities in Whitehall
and Simla are never tired of extolling the behavior of
the police, I thought I would go and see for myself
how this "exemplary behaviour" has affected the
Satyagrahis at Dharasana. I reached Bulsar at mid-day
on June 6 th , just as the wounded were being brought
in there from the "raid" of that morning. Many of them
were being carried on stretchers, others could just
struggle from the motors to hospital wards.

"The beating and torturing has been most merciless
today!" said the doctors and attendants. I proceeded
around the rooms to visit the Satyagrahis more closely
and to take notes from doctors as to the nature of their
wounds. Literally I felt my skin to creep and my hair
to stand on end as I saw those brave men, who but a
few hours previously had gone forth absolutely
unarmed, vowed to non-violence, now lying here
before me battered and broken from head to foot. Here
was a young man with his shoulders and buttocks so
beaten that he could not lie on his back, yet his arms
and sides were so damaged that he did not know how
to turn for rest. There was another gasping for breath
with his chest badly battered, and nearby was a strong,
tall Musselman lying utterly helpless.

"What are his damages?" I asked.

"He has received fearful blows on the stomach, the
back and right leg," they replied. "Also his testicles are

both swollen, having been badly squeezed by the
police."

We went upstairs. Here my attention was attracted
by the sounds of sharp-drawn, whistling breathing,
intermixed with heartrending groans. It was a young
man writhing in agony. He kept catching at his
stomach, and at intervals he would suddenly sit up as
if he were going to go mad with pain.

"Fie has had a deadly blow right on the abdomen,"
they said. "And he has been vomiting blood. He has
also had his testicles severely squeezed, which has
shattered his nerves."

They fetched ice and applied it to the head and
damaged parts, which gradually soothed him.

And so we went on from this house to another,
where we found still more and more wounded.
Everyone to whom I talked gave the same description
of fiendish beating, torturing, thrusting and dragging,
and one and all spoke with burning horror of the foul
abuse and unspeakable blasphemy which the police
and their Indian and English superiors had poured
upon them.

So this is some of the exemplary behaviour of the
police.... What then has become of English honor,
English justice?... Who could dare to uphold as a
means of dispersing a non-violent gathering: 1. Lathi
blows on head, chest, stomach and joints; 2. Thrusts
with lathis in private parts, abdominal regions; 3.
Stripping of men naked before beating; 4. Tearing off
loin cloths and thrusting of sticks into anus; 5. Pressing
and squeezing of the testicles until a man becomes

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unconscious; 6. Dragging of wounded men by legs and
arms, often beating them the while; 7. Throwing of
wounded men into thorn hedges or salt water;
8. Riding of horses over men as they lie or sit on the
ground; 9. Thrusting of pins and thorns into men's
bodies, sometimes even when they are unconscious;
10. Beating of men after they had become unconscious,

and other vile things too many to relate

The whole affair is one of the most devilish, cold-
blooded and unjustifiable in the history of nations.
India has now realized the true nature of the British
Raj (rule), and with the realization the Raj is doomed. 57

The Government did not protest that this description was
untrue. It merely ordered Young India to deposit $18,000 as a
guarantee against the publication of such articles in the future.
The magazine refused, because it could not. The Government
suppressed it, and confiscated its property.

That is all we are told, for over the great sacrifice the
censor has drawn the veil, lest we should be too much moved.
Behind the censor and the veil God knows what is happening
in India, what courage and suffering, what shooting and
bombing, what airplanes and tanks, what self-control of the
spirit, unknown in history, before power and terror and guns.

Meanwhile, as the printer prints these words, the Round
Table Conference opens in London. All the parties of England
are represented there by able men; but from India have come
only unrepresentative delegates, scorned by the nation.
Gandhi, Nehru pere et fils , Malaviya, Patel, Sarojini Naidu and
a hundred other leaders chosen by India to speak for it, are
in jail.

What will the British do? They have the power — all the

weapons of land and sea and air, an iron control of the Hindu
press, and a propaganda organization in every part of the
world, subtle and influential beyond belief. They do not yet
need to be just. Perhaps they will suggest to Parliament only
enough liberty for India as will leave it still at the mercy of
England, but will split the Nationalists into those willing, and
those unwilling, to welcome a crumb. So the British may
disrupt the present movement, turn the leaders upon one
another, and then, when the movement has broken up, rest
on their arms until they must fight again.

But then they will have to fight again. A people so
aroused, so patient and so tenacious, will not forget. The play
is not over. 1921 was the First Act; 1930 was the Second Act.
There will be a Third.

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CHAPTER FOUR

THE CASE FOR ENGLAND

I described in Chapter I the appalling condition of India
today. That description was colored with the prejudices
natural to an American; it stated the case for India without
pretense of offering the other side. I wish now to present the
English point of view as completely as I can in narrow
compass; to let England speak for herself, through her own
capable defenders; and to reserve all rejoinder until this
defense is complete. 1

I. England Speaks

1. The Nietzschean Defense

Ultimately the case for England's hold on India rests
upon the Nietzschean ethic of power — on the right of the
stronger to use the weaker for his purposes. Sir William
J oynson-Hicks, Home Minister in the Baldwin Government,
expressed the matter candidly some years ago. "I know it is
said in missionary meetings that we conquered India to raise
the level of the Indians. That is cant. We conquered India as
an outlet for the goods of Great Britain. We conquered India
by the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it." 2

For the Hindus (henceforth it is the British who speak)
are a lower race, doomed by their climate to some foreign

yoke. The heat of the sun and the aridity of the soil have made
India inevitably weak, and therefore poor, and therefore
ignorant; it is so incapable of self-preservation and self-
government that its entire known history is the story of its
repeated invasion by successful conquerors. Four thousand
years ago the Aryans came down out of the north, and created
a state and a civilization; the heat destroyed their vitality, and
they decayed. Seven hundred years ago the Mohammedans
came down out of the north, and created a state and a
civilization; the heat destroyed their vitality, and they decayed.
Four hundred years ago the Mongols came down out of the
north, and created a state and a civilization; the heat destroyed
their vitality, and they decayed. When the Mogul Empire in
India broke up at the opening of the eighteenth century, India
naturally fell a prey to new invaders, new rulers unweakened
by her heat. If England had not taken her, France would have
done it, or Portugal, or Holland; it was her good fortune to
be conquered by the greatest organizers and fairest rulers of
the modem world.

The earlier conquerors remained in India, and lost their
strength; the British come afresh in each generation from the
north, and their officials in India return every fifth year to
renew their vigor amid England's snows and rains; this is why
68,000 Englishmen can rule 320,000,000 Hindus. Look at a
British officer in India, and then look at a Hindu — peasant or
proletaire, poet or philosopher; you will understand at a
glance how inevitable and natural is the mastery of the one
and the submission of the other.

It is childish romanticism to idealize the Hindu; young
intellectuals enjoy a sense of superiority in patronizing the
weak. But Katherine Mayo has exposed this idealization once

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for all. Read her scornful pages and see the Hindus as they
are : a people defeated by caste and introverted by slavery;
sunk in such superstition as no other nation on earth would
bear with; millions of them in every year coming from great
distances to bathe in filth}/ rivers as a magic means of securing
a wealthy reincarnation, or, if they are lucky, eternal apathy
and everlasting death; millions of them offering animal
sacrifices to Kali, the goddess with blood- dripping jaws; thirty
millions of them starving while seventy million "sacred" cows
roam the streets leisurely, never slaughtered for Hindu food;
a million "holy men" sitting in naked idleness on bathing
ghats, or swings, or beds of nails, consuming without
producing; 1 64,000,000 women enslaved to men, some of them
digging ditches, others carrying burdens six hours a day for
ten cents a day, some of them ministering as temple prostitutes
to acquisitive and lecherous priests, half of them shut in by
purdah in close and stuffy zenanas , doomed to ignorance and
disease; two million girls married, and one million of them
widowed, by the age of ten; 26,000,000 widows forbidden to
seek a second mate; temples adorned with phallic statuary
showing gods and goddesses in various forms of sexual
intercourse; men divided inevitably by birth into two thousand
castes. Brahmins scorning Sudras, Sudras scorning Pariahs;
44,5000,000 Pariahs or "Untouchables" excluded by the caste
system from most of the schools, from the use of public wells,
from any contact or association with their betters, who
deliberately keep them in ignorance and slavery; these
Outcastes living in squalor unequaled elsewhere in the
world — their miserable alleys serving as cesspools, sewers and
privies — while rich Brahmins and native potentates hoard
gold, flash jewelry, and live in idle luxury; a nation poorer

than any, and yet multiplying beyond measure and beyond
control under the protection of British sanitation and British
guns: these are the people who lecture the English on morality,
and pretend that they are fit for democracy; these are the
superstitions and abuses behind that poverty and illiteracy
which the simple-minded attribute to foreign rule. 3

2. British Contribution to India

No; it is clear that a people so weakened and stupefied
needs for a long time to come the guidance of a race that will
bring them hygiene and hospitals, schools and colleges,
science and technology, officers and administrators, and a
careful preparation for self-rule under the tutelage of the freest
and best-governed of modern states. That this external
management of India has been a boon to her, one fact alone
suffices to prove, and that is the enormous growth of India's
population under the British regime. Irrigation works directed
by British engineers have added 20,00.0,000 acres to the
cultivable land 4 — an area equal to France. The Sukkur Barrage,
now nearing completion, will bring under irrigation a region
as large as cultivated Egypt. 5 Already 13% of the tilled acreage
of India is supplied by Government irrigation. 6 If the Hindu
peasant remains poor despite these great improvements, and
despite the labors of the Government to spread agricultural
education, it is because he is superstitiously attached to
ancestral methods and implements; because he indebts himself
to usurious money-lenders, all of his own race, to pay for
extravagant dowries and costly festivals; and because his
Nationalist leaders have not had the intelligence to see, or the
courage to say, that the root of Indian poverty lies in ignorant

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and reckless breeding. What India needs is not a Gandhi, nor
even a Tagore, but a Malthus to teach it the laws of population,
and a Voltaire to free it from superstition by laughing to death
its ridiculous gods.

No romantic return to medieval simplicity with Gandhi's
spinning-wheel will solve the problem of India's poverty; it
can be solved only by science and industry. Granted that the
factories of India, most of them owned now by Hindu
capitalists, exploit their workers after the fashion of all nascent
industrial systems; these are the measles and whooping-cough
of industry, and will be cured. Granted that the factory-
workers are underpaid; but they work far more leisurely, and
with far less skill, than the working men of Europe or America;
and at sowing or harvest time they are as likely as not to
abandon their factories and return to their villages, making
orderly and economical production impossible. 7 Meanwhile
Factory Acts have been passed, shortening the hours and
improving the conditions of labor; machinery and skilled
workers, technicians and capital, have been brought in to
transform India into cin efficient nation. The construction of
telegraph, telephone and postal systems, of electric light and
power plants, and 40,000 miles of railways, has opened the
path for the growth of India to wealth and pride. Already the
life and mind of the country have been quickened by these
unwelcomed innovations from the West; the new speed of
communication and travel has jarred the Fiindus from their
dogmatic slumber, and prepared them to compete with the
peoples of the modern world.

If India has seen the decay of her old domestic
handicrafts, it is because she rejected modern machinery and
methods, and thought she could stand still and yet remain

wealthy, while half the earth was moving forward into
industry. The Abbe Dubois predicted a century ago that the
scorn of the Brahmins for Western ideas and tools would leave
India becalmed and impoverished in the wake of a progressive
Europe. 8 If she has for a hundred years exported more goods
than she has received, it is because since the d ays of Pliny she
has preferred to import gold rather than goods, and chosen
to hoard her riches, or to congeal them into jewelry, rather
than invest them in productive enterprise. Even Gandhi has
admitted that this withholding of gold and silver from
circulation is a main source of India's poverty; 9 and Sir
Valentine Chirol has calculated that if the wealth thus hoarded
during the last half-century had been liberated to finance and
stimulate industry, the proceeds would now suffice to
discharge the whole of India's public debt. 10

To make up for the this spinster timidity of the Hindus,
the English have established 70,000 co-operative credit
societies to displace the ruthless money-lender, and have lent
vast sums to India at rates of interest far lower than those
demanded by Indian investors. The Indian railways were built,
and the factories of India were equipped, with British capital;
$2,500,000,000 have been invested by Europeans in Hindu
industries; and most of the $3,500,000,000 national debt
represents loans from England. 11 The "drain" from India to
England today is mostly composed of moderate interest
charges on these British loans.

India has never sent a penny of tribute to England; she
has merely paid for services received, for financial, technical,
administrative and medical aid. If India no longer exercises
economic mastery over nations that once acknowledged its
sway, this has been due not to political injustice, but to the

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normal processes of economic change. All life is war, and the
victories of industry and trade may be as decisive as those on
the battlefield. Economic competition among nations is as
legitimate as among individuals; that India has lost, and
England won, is an historical accident, not a British crime. For
many centuries, in the war between East and West, Asia held
the role of aggressor against Europe. That mastery was lost
when trade abandoned land routes for the sea; and nations
that relied on handicrafts were doomed by the Industrial
Revolution. Until India learns modern ways of production, it
will naturally and inevitably be subject to some modem state.

But even to speak of "India" is to confess the beneficence
of English rule. For until England came to her, India did not
exist; there was no political entity called India, but only a
congeries of independent states, forever at war. Even today
there is no Hindu word for all Indians, no language common
to them; their revolutionaries themselves use and propose
English as the only possible speech to unite all Hindus across
the barriers of their two hundred dialects. 12 Even today there
are in India seven hundred "Native States," ruled by native
princes subject to England only in foreign affairs; these princes
strongly object to the severance of India from the British
Empire, and would refuse, if necessary at the cost of civil war,
to submit to an Indian parliament. It is British discipline and
order that have kept the peace for a century among these many
states, these hostile religions and divisive castes; it is British
soldiers who are asked for by every community to preserve
the peace between Hindus and Monammedans. It is a British-
trained army, and a British-paid navy, that have protected
India for a hundred years from invasion by land or sea, from
wild tribes on the north and from land-hungry empires like

Japan. It is a British judiciary that has given to India an
enlightened code of civil and criminal law, administered
impartially to all; it is Western missionary enterprise that has
rescued the Outcaste from Brahmin scorn, given him medicine
and education, and infused into him some saving hope and
pride.

And it is from England that India has taken that ideal of
democracy which now agitates its revolutionaries. India has
never been democratic, either in practice or in theory; has
never offered its people equal opportunity in economic,
political, or social life. But under British rule the Hindus have
developed legislatures and ministries with extensive powers;
provincial services are almost entirely manned by natives; and
the admission of the Hindus to self-government despite their
dangerous factionalism and illiteracy has gone on at a pace
which has alarmed many careful observers.

For it is clear that India is not yet ripe for full democracy;
only a young intellectual who has no thought of facing the
realities and responsibilities of administration could imagine
a stable and competent government issuing from the universal
adult suffrage of these 320,000,000 heads, so full of superstition
and fanaticism. The sudden transportation of modes of
government from advanced nations to backward nations is no
longer advocated by any mature mind; and the only reason
why all responsible elements in India do not denounce this
scheme is that some of them hope to profit by its miscarriage.
"The success of Gandhi," says a Hindu, Sankara Nair, "would
be the success of the forces of reaction in their attempt to attain
what they call national independence, which in reality means
their sole dominion." 13 There are a thousand Hindu capitalists
waiting to exploit India unhindered when it is "free."

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We cannot speak of English contributions to the
improvement of Hindu religious life, for the passionate
conservatism of India closes this field to all external reform.
But one by one most of the moral abuses have yielded to
British patience and suggestion, from the abolition of suttee
in 1829 to the practical ending of child-marriage in 1929. We
must attribute to foreign influence and example the rising
status of women in India, the increasing remarriage of
widows, the introduction of birth control, and the
improvement in the condition of the Untouchables.

If these moral reforms make but a modest sum, the
cultural contributions of England to India are beyond
exaggeration. It was European scholars, chiefly English, who
studied the languages and cultures of ancient India, and
resurrected Vedic literature and wisdom; it was Europe that
revealed India to the Hindus. 14 Beore Sir William Jones and
Max Muller, history had been to the Hindus mere Maya —
surface appearance and delusion, deserving only to be
ignored; now it set the Indian imagination afire, and Hindu
Nationalists, like the Romantics of SchlegeFs day, turned to
warm their faith in their country at the hearth of her idealized
past. India became interested in learning, in scholarship, at last
even in science; schools financed by the Government and by
the foreign missions won over the distrustful students, and
Western education, which a Hindu historian calls "the greatest
of blessings India has gained under British rule," 15 began its
attack upon superstition, ignorance and sloth. India, mentally
stagnant for almost a thousand years, had waited for just such
alien seed to fertilize it; in the crossing of these cultures.
Oriental and Western — in the stinging contact of East and
West, of religion and science, of handicrafts and industry —

lay the source of that Indian Renaissance which has begotten
so prematurely the Indian Revolution. 16 The East is drunk with
the wine of the West, with the lust for liberty, luxury and
power.

3. The Key to the White Man's Power

But liberty is impossible in the modern world, if only
because nations are too interdependent economically to be
ever again quite free, until our industrial civilization ends.
Wherever industry replaced agriculture it compelled the
importation of food and — to pay for the food — the exportation
of manufactured goods; it compelled the search for raw
materials and markets; it compelled peoples dependent in this
way upon foreign areas to protect their own security by
acquiring control of those areas; it compelled imperialism.
There is a manifest destiny, but it is economic rather than
political; and one of its laws is that any people unable to
develop the resources of its soil for the needs of the world is
fated to be ruled, directly or indirectly, by a people capable
of promoting the development of that soil. Englishmen driven
from farms to factories by the Industrial Revolution would
have starved to death in their great cities if they had not been
able to find foreign raw materials, fuel and food. They found
them, and made them secure for England; it is what any nation
would have done, what all nations do. That is the essence of
modern history.

So, by the impersonal process of economic evolution,
England has become dependent upon India; and any sudden
severance of their relations would be politically dangerous for
India, and economically reunions for England. Consider what

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would happen if India were at once to receive complete Home
Rule : she would pass legislation involving the loss of a billion
dollars to European investors; she would put up a high tariff
on British goods, and throw a million British working men into
the swollen ranks of the unemployed; she would teach all her
growing generation a hatred of Western civilization; she
would dismiss British civil servants and British officers,
destroy the efficiency of the Indian army, open the frontier to
Afghan tribes and Russian encroachments, and put an end to
the British Empire.

For a century Russia has been advancing into Southern
Asia; now she controls the new Soviet republics of
Turkmanistan, Uzbekia, Taikistan, and Kara Khirgis. Let
England step out of India, and Russia will step in. India and
China will join Russia in a Soviet federation that will wage
a bitter economic battle, and perhaps mobilize a billion
Asiatics, in a war of the continents to destroy European
trade and Western civilization. The greatest system of order
ever built — the British Commonwealth — is at stake; the
security of travel, the safety of white men in Asiatic states,
the peace and existence of Australia and New Zealand, the
whole prestige and leadership of the white race on the
globe, are imperiled by the Indian Revolution. Give India
Home Rule, and she will demand equality with Canada,
South Africa and Australia; give her this equality, and she
will demand freedom of Hindu emigration to these
countries; permit this, and the standard of living all over
the world will sink to the Asiatic level. A German professor,
George Wegener, expressed the heart of the matter as far
back as 1911 : "It is in India, of all places on the earth, that
the superiority of the white over the colored races is most

strikingly demonstrated. If the Asiatics were to succeed in
destroying English mastery there, then the position of the
whole white race throughout the world be fatally
undermined." 17

It is not a choice between theories that confronts us, it is
a choice between Asia and ourselves; between life as it is lived
by Pariahs and coolies, and life as it has been enriched in
Europe and America by industry and trade. When England
is compelled to leave India it will mark the inauguration of
Asia's mastery of the globe.

II. India Answers

This is the case for refusing Home Rule to India. What
has the Hindu to say to it?

1. Morals in India

He will remind the English how, indignantly they
denounced, in 1914, the Nietzschean ethic which in the last
resort is the only ground on which the British retention of
India can be defended today. He will attribute the subjugation
of 320,000,000 Hindus by 68,000 Englishmen not to the climate
of India, 18 but to the historical accident that England found
India helpless in 1757, disarmed her, and, by control of the
seas, has kept her weaponless ever since. He will protest
against comparing the conduct, superstitions, and intellect of
a people oppressed and kept ignorant for a century with those
of nations reaping now the harvest of a century of liberty and
public education. He will wonder whether British refusal to
"interfere" with Hindu religion was not due in some measure

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to a sense of the great advantage, to an alien government, of
a creed that stupefied men with myth and ritual, and consoled
them for earthly suffering with dreams of future bliss. He will
recall to the West its own superstitions, recently gathered
together by Professor Richet in his book on Idiot Man , and he
will suggest that Hindu superstitions are not worse than ours,
but merely different; he will compare Lourdes with Benares,
and remark on the popularity, among us, of new religions that
reject medicine and seek to heal with faith. He will picture vast
crowds flocking to a grave in quest of miraculous cures; he
will point out that the central item in our religious ritual is a
relic of savage theophagy. He will admire our sympathy for
the goats sacrificed to Kali, and will offer his own to the
thousands of cattle slaughtered at Chicago every day. He will
acknowledge the evils of the caste system, and inquire whether
the attitude of a Brahmin to a Pariah differs, except in words,
from that of a British lord to a navy, or a Park Avenue banker
to an East Side huckster, or a white man to a negro, or a
European to an Asiatic.

He will regret the early age of marriage in India, 19 and
its unnatural deferment here; he will mourn over child
widows in India, and child laborers in America — a million and
a half children under thirteen in the factories of the United
States. 20 He will compare the hostility of Moslems and Hindus
in India to the recent riots of Protestants against Catholics in
Liverpool, the Know-nothing outbreaks of the last century in
America, the genial persuasiveness of the Ku Klux Klan, and
the part played by religion in the presidential election of 1928.
He will voice his sorrow for the wars of the Hindu princes,
and the War of the Nations; for the subjection of women in
India, and the subjection of men in America; for the disabilities

of the Untouchables there, and the lynching of negroes here.
He will admit that adultery is not as highly developed in India
as in more prosperous countries. He will comment gently on
the popularity of murder and fornication in the United States;
on our superiority in criminal gangs and political machines;
on the break-down of government in our cities, and the
unsafety of life in our streets and our homes; on our riots of
drunkenness in America and in Paris; on the spread of sexual
promiscuity and disease, and the disappearance of
professional prostitution; on the erotomania of ou r cot leges,
our night-life, our stage, and our literature; on the primitive
vulgarity of our motion-pictures and our musical comedies;
on the decay of marriage and the home, and the passage of
order and discipline from our lives.

No doubt every civilization has its faults, and only the
most unfair mind would present a list of the faults as a
description of the civilization. An American may still love
America despite the evils which he finds within its borders;
he may still object to foreign control of American cities despite
their evident unfitness for self-government. The Hindu has
been the first to acknowledge the abuses of his country. From
over a century ago, when Ram Mohan Roy initiated the
movement to abolish suttee, down to 1929, when the Hindu
legislature, against the original opposition of the British
Government in India, 21 raised the age of marriage to fourteen
for women and eighteen for men, it is native reform
organizations like the Brahmo-Somaj and the Arya-Somaj that
have fought the best fight against child-marriage, perpetual
widowhood, caste, bloody sacrifices, polytheism, and idolatry.
"The roll-call of those associated in the movement to secure
more humane treatment for the Outcastes is long and

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illustrious." 22 Gandhi has risked his whole position on the
liberation of the Untouchables; he has adopted an Outcaste girl
as his own, and refuses to enter any home whose doors are
closed to her.

"I loathe and detest child-marriage," says Gandhi; "I
shudder to see a child- widow. I have never known a grosser
superstition than that the Indian climate causes sexual
precocity. What does bring about untimely puberty is the
mental and moral atmosphere surrounding family life." 23
Nothing could be more straightforward; indeed there are many
who believe that Gandhi is here too hard on his people. "We
must compare a girl of fifteen in India with one of seventeen
in England," says Ernest Wood. 24 "Personally," said Lajpat Rai,
"I consider it a social crime to marry a girl under the age of
sixteen, even though Indian girls reach puberty about the age
of twelve." 25 "It can be safely said that a young girl of twelve
in India is as old as a young woman of fifteen in America." 26
Those who like to be generous would add that large classes of
Hindu society avoid child-marriage; 27 that, according to the
official census of India, 28 child-marriage is merely betrothal,
the girl remaining with her parents until puberty, and only
when consummating the union; that 60% of the girls marry
after fifteen; 29 that consummation before the age of thirteen
has long been illegal; 30 that the average age of first motherhood
in India is 18.3 years. 31 Finally, we must do what justice we
can to the purpose behind the institution of child-marriage —
the acceptance of it as preferable both to premarital
promiscuity and to the choice of mates under the blinding
influence of erotic desire. 32 Sexual irregularities are much rarer
in India than in almost any other country. We may entertain
every expectation, however, that India will soon emulate

America, and replace early marriage with promiscuity.

In no other country is the reformation of moral abuses
progressing so rapidly as in India. Child-marriage is already
ended, and "the vast majority of Hindus remarry their
widows"; compulsory widowhood will probably disappear in
a generation. In 1915 fifteen widows married; in 1925, 2,663. 33
The temple dancers, or Devadasis, are almost extinct; every
tourist searches for them and finds none. The seclusion of
women is breaking down; the Revolutionary movement has
brought them into the open with almost Western precipitation.
A number of periodicals for women discuss the most up-to-
date problems; even a birth-control league has appeared. 34 The
cities are breaking down purdah day by day, until now hardly
6% of the women observe it; 35 modest women walk the streets
unveiled and unabashed. In many of the provinces women
vote and hold political office; twice women have been
president of the Indian National Congress. Many of them have
taken degrees at the universities, and have become doctors,
lawyers, and professors. 36 Soon, no doubt, the tables will be
turned, and women will rule. Must not some wild Western
influence bear the guilt of this appeal issued by a subaltern
of Gandhi to the women of India?

"Away with ancient purdahl Come out of the
kitchens quick! Fling the pots and pans rattling into
comers! Tear the cloth from your eyes, and see the new
world! Let your husbands and brothers cook for
themselves. There is much work to be done to make
India a nation!" 37

Such is the result of the "fertilization of the Orient with
Western ideas/ 7 We cannot tell yet whether this intellectual
seduction of a sub-continent will prove to be a favor or a curse.

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2. The Decay of Caste

The greatest evil of all remains. Caste was once a
necessity, a cordon of marriage restrictions flung between
conquerors and conquered to keep the Aryan blood pure and
the stock strong; even today we would not ask the high-caste
Brahmin to lie down with the unwashed and omnivorous
Pariah. There is in caste a hygienic and eugenic element in
accord with the most modern biological ideas. And all through
Indian history the castes were rather occupational guilds than
ethnic strata or political cliques; every trade constituted a caste;
and if the Brahmins formed a caste it was largely because they
were united by their functions as teachers and priests.

It is only with the passing of the handicrafts, and the
coming of urban industry, that the caste system has become
an anachronism. Heredity of trades, so reasonable in domestic
industry, is an impediment in cities and factories. The
Industrial Revolution dissolved all class-formations, and
generated democracy, by demanding and using talent from
every corner and every rank. It is on the program of our
century, no doubt, to destroy the caste system in India, not by
agitation, but by impersonal economic evolution. Already the
factories are mingling Brahmins, Vaisyas, Kshatriyas, Sudras
and Untouchables; the mines are mingling them; the trams and
trains are mingling them; the co-operatives and the schools are
mingling them; one writer believes, too optimistically, that
caste will, in effect, be destroyed within twenty years. 38 The
Kshatriyas and Vaisyas have practically disappeared. The
lower castes have elected mayors in large cities; the ruler of
Barocla, the most advanced of Indian states, is a Sudra; the
Maharajah of Gwalior is a Sudra; the Maharajah of Mysore is

a Vaisya; the Maharajah of Kashmir receives all castes and
creeds indifferently at his court; women of every caste mingle
in careless unity at the National Congresses; inter-caste
marriages are announced every day. Anyone who cares to
look may see Hindus of every caste eating together, working
together, playing together, or sitting together at the theatre,
with no consciousness of caste.* 39

But Untouchability is real. Even today, in some parts of
India, the Outcastes are excluded from temples, public wells,
and certain roads. A hundred organizations have extended
helping hands to them; but until industry multiplies wealth
and gives them a share of it, they will be too poor to be clean,
and too dirty to be free. Their liberation is coming to them
from above, from the campaigns waged for them by the
Brahmo-Somaj, the Arya-Somaj, the Christian churches, and
Gandhi, 40 and from the schools established by the Government
under Hindu initiative. 41 In 1917 the number of Outcaste
scholars in the schools was 195,000; in 1926 it was 667,000 42
Under Gandhi's influence Brahmins and Pariahs have
fraternized in many places 43 India changes slowly. But every
day the tempo quickens; and any day India may decide to
become a modern state.

It might have been supposed that these reforms would
receive every aid and encouragement from the British
Government in India. Strange to say, it opposed them almost
without exception. "In legislation upon matters of social
reform the Indian Government has always thrown its weight

* I found myself, one afternoon at Madras, sitting with several
Hindus, when it occurred to me to ask to what caste they severally
belonged. They answered, smiling indulgently that they no longer
paid any attention to such distinctions. It is possible, however,
that this was an exceptional, not a typical, experience.

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upon the side of the status quo . The social reform movement
has had to work without any countenance from officials/' 44
The bill to raise the age of consent was resisted by the
Government for many years; the bill for universal primary
education was defeated by the Government in 1911 and in
191 6. 45 "The laws as they are administered today uphold these
superstitions" (the disabilities of the Outcastes), "and punish
the Untouchables who dare to disregard them. Whenever a
member of the Depressed Classes attempts to enforce his civic
rights, the law steps in under the guise of preserving the
peace." 46 "The British Government has always been friendly
to caste; . . . first, because this policy tended to win the favor
of the Brahmins, ...and second, because caste divisions(or
other divisions) tend to make the British task of holding the
people in subjection more easy, on the principle of "divide and
govern." 47 The Government excuses itself by proclaiming its
desire not to interfere with Hindu religion; but the Hindus
themselves, in many of the Native States, have inaugurated
moral and social reforms many years before these were
accepted by the Government of British India. 48 Let an English
clergyman and professor, the Rev. C.F. Andrews, sum up the
matter :

It has been my daily experience for nearly a
quarter of a century to watch the course of events
in India with an eager longing for advance in
humanitarian directions. Every day my own
convictions — slowly and painfully formed — have
grown stronger, that the rule of the foreigner is now
definitely standing in the way of helping social
reform. In the Legislative Councils the official note
is continually given for reaction... If the British rule

were to cease to-morrow, the advancement of the
Depressed Classes would at once be brought into the
foreground of the national program. ..In social
reform work in India it is probably true that
progress would be doubly rapid if Indian statesmen
had the helm instead of British. 49

3. Greek Gifts

Even that economic development which has been held
up to India as the dire prerequisite of her freedom has been
retarded by English control. It is true that the Government, on
a smaller scale than the old rulers of India, 50 constructed
irrigation works, and then charged so much for the water these
supplied that the peasants were in many cases as badly off as
before. 51 It is true that new areas have been opened for
cultivation to new over-taxed paupers, and that far greater
areas have been lost to cultivation by cutting down huge tracts
of wooded land, failing to reforestate, and thereby converting
fertile regions into arid wastes. 52 It is true that India has
imported silver and gold, and that this has largely gone into
the Native States to adorn idle princes maintained by British
power. A Hindu historian has shown that this influx of gold
falls far short of accounting for the gaping discrepancy
between exports and imports; 53 and an English economist has
calculated that after making full allowance for the import of
precious metal, "the yearly drain from British India of
commercial products for which there is no commercial return,"
amounts to "upward of $150,000,000 a year." 54

It is true that industries have been introduced to take
advantage of sweated labor, and that the native industries of

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India were killed by English control of the Hindu tariff. The
industrialization for lack of which India is censured was stifled
in its growth by act of Parliament. The railroads, which have
so helped British commerce and the British army, have been
a drain on the treasury; their losses have been made up, year
after year, from the taxes of the people. The worst famines in
Indian history have come since the building of the railways,
which were supposed to relieve famine. 55 "The year 1897-98,"
says Professor Dutt, "was a year of widespread famine in
India, and millions of people died of starvation. Nevertheless,
the land revenue was collected to the amount of $85,000,000,
and cultivators paid it largely by selling their food-grain,
which was exported to the amount of $50,000,000 in that
calamitous year." 56 Today, after all these economic
contributions of England to India, "personal observation," says
an Englishman, "would lead me to the opinion that India's
poverty is becoming more acute." 57 And an experienced
American traveller reports : "The Hindu people impress the
visitors as woe-begone and melancholy. One never hears a
laugh, and rarely sees even a deprecating smile." 58 Is it not
time that England should be called to account for what she
has done, and not done, in India, these one hundred and fifty
years?

It is said that England has given India unity. On the
contrary she has delayed unity by supporting the caste
system, and setting up puppet princes in seven hundred
"independent" Native States, upon whose autocratic rulers
Britain can rely to oppose the unification of India under a
democracy. The Simon Report recommends further disunity
by proposing the almost complete independence of each
province; its secret purpose again is to "divide and rule."

India has two hundred languages, or rather dialects; so has
Russia; so has non-Russian Europe, which is no larger than
India; Canada, with one-thirtieth of India's population, has
178. 59 Already 200,000,000 of India's 320,000,000 speak
Hindustani. 60 For thousands of years India has had a unity
far deeper than that of language or government; she has had
the moral and cultural unity of Europe in the Middle
Ages — that Europe which lost its unity when modern
nationalism began. 61 Only self-government can give India
political solidarity.

It is said that England has given India law and order and
peace. That is, she has annexed state after state of India by
superior killing, called victories; she has used India's manhood
in 111 wars; and she has shot down or imprisoned those
Hindus who dared to suggest that this was not law, or order,
or peace. She has allowed the Hindus the privilege of fighting
for every cause but their own; she has made a wilderness and
called it peace. There is not an American in America who
would not prefer chaos to such peace.

There are riots between Moslems and Hindus in India.
But only in the British provinces; strange to say, they are rare
in the Native States. 62 "In the case of many of these
disturbances," says the always kindly and careful Gandhi, "we
hear of Government agents being at the back of them. The
allegation, if true, would be painful to me, not surprising." 63
Ramsay MacDonald writes of the "suspicion that sinister
influences have been and are at work on the part of the
Government; that Mohammedan leaders have been and are
inspired by certain British officials, and that these officials, of
malice aforethought, sow discord between the Mohammedan
and Hindu communities." 64 Lord Olivier, Secretary of State for

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India under the first MacDonald Government, said : "No one
with a close acquaintance with Indian affairs will be prepared
to deny that on the whole there is a predominant bias in British
officialdom in favor of the Moslem community, partly on the
ground of closer sympathy, but more largely as a make-weight
against Hindu nationalism." 65 It is a secret known to all that
the removal of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi was aimed
to secure the support of the Moslems against the Hindus. The
system of communal or sectarian elections, by which religious
groups in India vote as a unit, for members of their own sect
exclusively, has intensified these divisions. The Simon Report
proposes to continue this system, and lauds England for
conferring unity on India.

All in all, the transference of British law to India has
probably done more good than harm. The English judiciary,
at home and abroad, are usually men of high character; and
the admission of all castes to equality before the law has
immensely stimulated India. In practice these virtues are
slightly dimmed by the complexity and costliness of the
new code; the simple Panchayats, or village communities,
which once decided disputes and maintained order, have
been replaced by a legal system intelligible only to lawyers,
slow in its operation (important civil cases usually last five
years), and prohibitive in cost to any low-caste Hindu. 66 The
system has benefited the lawyers more than the people. 67
And while justice may be relied upon in cases involving
only Europeans or only natives, in cases involving the two
races justice is tempered with mercy — to the European.
"Crimes committed by Europeans against Indians are
always punished in the lightest manner possible, often so
inadequately as to attract public attention and constitute a

scandal." 68 An Englishman shoots his servant dead and
receives a sentence of six months' imprisonment and $67.00
fine; a Hindu is sentenced to twenty years for attempting
to rape an Englishwoman, while in the same province an
Englishman who succeeds in raping a Hindu girl is
acquitted with no punishment at all. 69 Says Sir Henry
Cotton, long an English official in India : "Assaults on
natives of India by Europeans have always been of frequent
occurrence, with sometimes fatal consequences. The trial of
these cases, in which Englishmen are tried by English juries,
too often results in a failure of justice not falling short of
judicial scandal." 70 Pandit Motilal Nehru, for forty years a
lawyer in India, charges that not one Englishman has been
convicted of murder in India in the last 150 years; the death
of the Hindu is always diagnosed as due to accident. 71
Mahatma Gandhi, the fairest and most truthful man in
public life today, says : "In 99 cases out of 100, justice is
denied to Indians as against Europeans in the courts of
India. This is not an exaggerated picture. .It is the experience
of almost every Indian who has had anything to do with
such cases." 72 When the Marquis of Ripon, as Governor
General of India, proposed a bill to remove from Indian law
"every judicial disqualification based merely on race
distinctions," his palace was boycotted by his own
countrymen. 73

As to British "protection of India" — let us keep our
hypocrisy within moderation; what the English mean is that
they have kept other poachers out of the field. British
protection means that British battleships are in the harbors,
British machine-guns in the barracks, and British bombing-
planes in the hangars, ready to kill the necessary thousands

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of Hindus if India should seriously rebel. Granted that if
English protection were to end, some other exploiter would
step in; what difference could that make to India?

Far more honest is the claim that England has taught
India democracy, and initiated it into the marvels and perils
of modern science.*

. A Hindu must confess that before 1857 India had known
only unmitigated autocracy in its central government, and that
it enjoys more peace and security of life today than under even
the most enlightened of native princes or Mogul Kings. The
teacher has taught so well that now she resents the progress
of her pupil; and scores of free Englishmen arise to point out
to India that liberty is dangerous, and that only Europeans are
fit for democracy. England forgets that only a small minority
of her people could read and write when she liberated herself
from autocracy through Magna Charta. 74 As Gandhi reminds
us, literacy and intelligence are not the same; the greatest of
Indian rulers — Akbar — could not read.

A host of observers testify to the high average
intelligence, the extraordinary peaceableness and orderliness,
of the Hindu people. Lord Morley spoke of the native officials
in India as "in every way as good as the best of the men in
Whitehall. " /5 Earl Winterton, Under-Secretary of State for
India, did "not hesitate to say," 1927, "that in culture and in
education the leading men among the Hindus are not behind
the public men of any country." 7 *’ Dr. V H. Rutherford,
comparing his fellow-members of the House of Commons
with the Hindu members of the national and provincial

* At Tanjore, in the courts of the great temple, a handsome youth
sat studying a Western text-book of anatomy ; he was a symbol of
the Great Change — of the modern movement from faith to power.

legislatures of India, found "a definite inferiority among the
Englishmen compared with the Indians." 77 J.P.Spender, editor
of the Westminster Gazette , said in 1927 : "There is no eastern
country which has so many talented men in so many walks
of life as India." 78 Sir Michael Sadler, President of the Calcutta
University Commission, said in 1919 that "as for brain-power,
there is that in India which is comparable with the best in our
country"; in spiritual qualities he ranked the Hindus above the
British. 79 The Simon Report remarks : "We have seen several
of the Provincial Councils in session, and have been impressed
both with the dignity and the business like conduct of their
proceedings." 80 And Romain Rolland tells us : "I have not
found, in Europe or in America, poets, thinkers and popular
leaders equal, or even comparable, to those of India today." 81
Travellers are amazed at the ability with which the elected
representatives of the lowest castes are governing Madras. The
courage, intelligence, and patient co-operation of the Hindu
leaders in the Nationalist movement are sufficient proof that
there is in India abundant talent to ensure a stable
government. And perhaps disorderly self-government could
be no worse than an orderly an dishonorable slavery, which
undermines the pride and character of a people, and makes it
ever more unfit for independence. Chaos is better than
emasculation.

It is regrettable that India has become an economic
necessity to British merchants and financiers. However, it was
not India that brought about this situation; nor do we usually
consider the inconvenience caused to the robber as an
argument against the restoration of stolen goods. If a Hindu
tariff controlled by India would injure British industry, let
England recall the destruction worked upon Indian industry

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by a Hindu tariff dictated in England. Gandhi has long since
promised, every responsible Hindu group has promised, that
in establishing Home Rule "full guarantees" are "to be given
for all vested rights justly acquired ." 82 But the working men
of England must not be deceived into supposing that they
have profited from the subjection of India. They have never
been allowed to share in the spoils; they have been as poorly
paid while England sold their sweated products to India as
were the workers of countries having no colonies and no
empires . 83 Who knows but that an India free and growing
would not soon double the imports now bought from England
by an India impoverished and enslaved? Perhaps it is the
prosperity of the East that is needed to restore the trade of the
dying West?

As to the political implications of Hindu freedom, they
cannot be too complex for adjustment between peoples agreed
on mutual consideration. Rather it is the continued subjection
of India that may bring problems incapable of solution. Not
merely that imperialism becomes ever more costly as
"backward" nations become more advanced, and exploitation
exacts an almost ruinous expenditure on armies, navies, and
propaganda — consider the money being spent at present to
form and control American public opinion about India. But
the compulsory retention of an unfriendly India within the
British Empire requires a supreme navy, which taxes more and
more the finances of Britain, and compels America to tax
herself in naval rivalry.

Sooner or later the bondage of India will cause other wars
as it caused the last. Every student knows that it was the threat
of a Beriin-to-Baghdad Railway that decided England to enter
the Great War. Historians know that it was the fear of a French

march through Egypt to India that made England fight until
the power of Napoleonic France was destroyed; and that the
mixed marriage of England with Turkey in the Crimean War
was due to British fear that a victorious Russia would stretch
a paw through Persia and Afghanistan into India . 84 Let British
workers realize that it was for this that a million of them were
killed in the Great War — not for the rights and self-
determination of small nations, but for the continued
enslavement of great peoples. As Gandhi has put it : "The late
War... was a war for dividing the spoils of the exploitation of
the weaker races, — otherwise euphemistically called 'world
commerce'"; and he remarks, elsewhere : "The greatest
menace to the world today is the growing, exploitation,
irresponsible imperialism which through the enslavement of
India is threatening the independent existence and expansion
of the weaker races of the world ." 85 If that is so, nothing can
be added to the conclusion of Lajpat Rai : "India holds in her
hands the remedy for this universal misfortune, for she is the
keystone of the arch of imperialism. Once India is free, the
whole edifice will collapse. The best guarantee for the freedom
of Asia and the peace of the world is a free, self-governing
India ." 86

144

THE CASE FOR INDIA

CONCLUSION

145

CONCLUSION

WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE

I have tried to express fairly the two points of view about
India, but I know that my prejudice has again and again
broken through my pretense at impartiality. It is hard to be
without feeling, not to be moved with a great pity, in the
presence of 320,000,000 people struggling for freedom, in the
presence of a Tagore, a Gandhi, a Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, a
Sarojini Naidu, fretting in chains; there is something indecent
and offensive in keeping such men and women in bondage.
To be neutral in this matter is to confess that we have lost
every hope and every ideal, and that our American
experiment, and indeed all human life, have become
meaningless. Our gratitude for our own national liberty, for
the opportunity which our Revolution gave us to develop
ourselves in freedom, obliges us to wish well to the
Washingtons and Jeffersons, the Franklins and Freneaus and
Tom Paines, of India. We may still believe that taxation
without representation is tyranny.

Nevertheless it would be unwise to seek now complete
independence for India, or complete democracy; universal
suffrage should wait upon universal education, and complete
independence has been made impossible by the international
character of modern economic life. The British Empire is still
a manificent organization, an area of order and safety in a
chaotic world whose lanes of commerce may at any time be

infested again with bandits on land and pirates on the sea; it
is good that these systems of order and internal peace should
exist, if their component parts can be left honorable free. Once
security required isolation; now it requires co-operation. We
may even find something forgivable in the grandiose will of
Cecil Rhodes, who announced, as his ideal and aim,

the extension of British rule throughout the world,
the occupation by British settlers of the entire continent
of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the
whole of South America, the ultimate recovery of the
United States of America as an integral part of the British
Empire; the inauguration of a system of colonial
representation in the Imperial Parliament, which may
tend to weld together the disjointed members of the
Empire; and , finally, the foundation of so great a power
as to hereafter render war impossible, and to promote the
best interests of humanity. 1

Our incorrigible prejudice moves us to prefer a free
association of the English-speaking peoples as against the
absorption of South or North America into the British Empire.
We admire the Empire, but we hope for the day when it will
be a Commonwealth of Free Nations. We believe that India's
safest place in this acquisitive and murderous world is within
that British Commonwealth; for a long time to come it will
need British aid against invasion, against land-hungry native
princes, and against religious fanaticism within. It should be
willing to make a fair return for that aid, by agreeing to accept
a diminishing foreign control for another decade, and by
giving guarantees that Home Rule will do no injury to
established foreign investments, or legitimate trade, or
religious minorities, or existing governments in the Native

144

THE CASE FOR INDIA

CONCLUSION

145

CONCLUSION

WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE

I have tried to express fairly the two points of view about
India, but I know that my prejudice has again and again
broken through my pretense at impartiality. It is hard to be
without feeling, not to be moved with a great pity, in the
presence of 320,000,000 people struggling for freedom, in the
presence of a Tagore, a Gandhi, a Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, a
Sarojini Naidu, fretting in chains; there is something indecent
and offensive in keeping such men and women in bondage.
To be neutral in this matter is to confess that we have lost
every hope and every ideal, and that our American
experiment, and indeed all human life, have become
meaningless. Our gratitude for our own national liberty, for
the opportunity which our Revolution gave us to develop
ourselves in freedom, obliges us to wish well to the
Washingtons and Jeffersons, the Franklins and Freneaus and
Tom Paines, of India. We may still believe that taxation
without representation is tyranny.

Nevertheless it would be unwise to seek now complete
independence for India, or complete democracy; universal
suffrage should wait upon universal education, and complete
independence has been made impossible by the international
character of modem economic life. The British Empire is still
a manificent organization, an area of order and safety in a
chaotic world whose lanes of commerce may at any time be

infested again with bandits on land and pirates on the sea; it
is good that these systems of order and internal peace should
exist, if their component parts can be left honorable free. Once
security required isolation; now it requires co-operation. We
may even find something forgivable in the grandiose will of
Cecil Rhodes, who announced, as his ideal and aim,

the extension of British rule throughout the world,
the occupation by British settlers of the entire continent
of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the
whole of South America, the ultimate recovery of the
United States of America as an integral part of the British
Empire; the inauguration of a system of colonial
representation in the Imperial Parliament, which may
tend to weld together the disjointed members of the
Empire; and , finally, the foundation of so great a power
as to hereafter render war impossible, and to promote the
best interests of humanity. 1

Our incorrigible prejudice moves us to prefer a free
association of the English-speaking peoples as against the
absorption of South or North America into the British Empire.
We admire the Empire, but we hope for the day when it will
be a Commonwealth of Free Nations. We believe that India's
safest place in this acquisitive and murderous world is within
that British Commonwealth; for a long time to come it will
need British aid against invasion, against land-hungry native
princes, and against religious fanaticism within. It should be
willing to make a fair return for that aid, by agreeing to accept
a diminishing foreign control for another decade, and by
giving guarantees that Home Rule will do no injury to
established foreign investments, or legitimate trade, or
religious minorities, or existing governments in the Native

148

THE CASE FOR INDIA

CONCLUSION

149

to success on a non-violent basis, it will give a new meaning
to patriotism, and, if I may say so in all humility, to life itself /' 5
Yes, life would be dearer to us, it would again have
significance beyond ourselves, if India should win.

To Ramsay MacDonald the situation offers such a chance
for nobility as does not come twice to many men. What an
opportunity to speak the healing word, even if it should
destroy him! Will he remember his promise, and keep it at
whatever cost to himself and his party? He must go down in
defeat soon; for what better cause, then, than for dealing
honorably with India? Perhaps, if his measures for Indian
Home Rule should be framed, with his customary caution and
good sense, to ease the problems which Hindu freedom might
bring to British industry, the ancient English love of liberty and
fair play would see him through, as it has lifted him up now
despite his heroic opposition to the War. What a chance for
England to be England again!

As for America, officially it can do nothing; it must leave
Britain to face alone and unhindered these issues that involve
the very life of her Empire. But as individuals we are free to
be true to our national tradition of lending a sympathetic
hearing to every people struggling for liberty. Writers who are
not mere dilettantes, not mere money-makers, bear a moral
obligation to leave no word unturned until the case of India
has been presented to the world. Christian clergymen who are
still in touch with Christ will speak out unequivocally/ time
and again, for India, until their united voices are heard beyond
the sea. Let them ferret out the facts and pour them forth
among their people, until not an American will be left to stand
by in ignorant comfort while one-fifth of mankind is on
Golgotha.

"What is your message to America?" Gandhi was asked
recently. He answered, modestly : "I would like, on the part
of the people of America, an accurate study of the Indian
struggle, and the methods adopted for its prosecution ." 6 And
Lajpat Rai, Columbia University student, founder of the Arya-
Somaj, inscribed to America in the following words the great
book. Unhappy India , which he left unfinished when he was
struck down as he marched unarmed in a peaceful parade :

DEDICATED

With love and gratitude to those numberless
American men and women who stand for the freedom of
the world; who know no distinctions of color , race , or
creed; and who prefer a religion of love , humanity , and
justice. To them the oppressed people of the earth look
for sympathy in their struggle for emancipation, and in
them is centered the hope of world-peace.

What more could be said? How could we read these
words without offering to India some sign of understanding,
and gatitude.

149

150

THE CASE FOR INDIA

NOTES

151

NOTES

CHAPTER I

1 . For detailed exposes of Miss Mayo's Mother India cf.: Dr.
J.T.Sunderland's magnificent India in Bondage, New York,
1929 — so good that its circulation is prohibited by the British
Government in India; or Ernest Wood's chivalrous An
Englishman Defends Mother India, Madras, 1929; or Savel
Zimand's Living India, New York, 1928; or -full of
information, but difficult to secure — Lajpat Rai's Unhappy
India, Banna Publishing Co., Calcutta, 1928.

2. Sunderland, pp. 480-1.

3. Indian Year-Book, Bombay, 1929, p.44; G.Elliot Smith, Human
History, New York, 1929, p.360.

4. Kohn, H., History of Nationalism in the East, New York, 1929,
p.350.

5. Travel Diary of a Philosopher, New York, 1925, vol. I, pp.
302,273.

6. Ibid., p.256.

7. Sunderland, p. 367. Similar evidence will be found in Dutt,
R.C. Economic History of India under Early British Rule,
London, 1893, pp.100, 105,110,415.

8. Zimand, p.32.

9. Adams, Brooks, Law of Civilization and Decay, New York,
1921, p. 308; Zimand, p.34; Smith, V., Oxford History of India,
Oxford, 1923, p. 505; Macaulay, T.B., Critical and Historical
Essays, vol. I, p. 504 (italics mine).

10. Zimand, p. 31.

11. Dutt, pp. 18-23.

12. Oxford History of India, p. 502.

13. Zimand, p-34.

14. Macaulay, p. 580.

15. Ibid., p. 530; Dutt, pp. 32-3.

16. Dutt, p. 61; Macaulay, p.529.

17. Dutt, pp. 76,375.

18. Macaulay, pp.603 f.

19. Ibid., p. 609 f.

20. Dutt, p. 7.

21. Macaulay, pp. 568-70.

22. P. 498.

23. Macaulay, p. 528.

24. Dutt, pp. xiii, 399, 417.

25. Oxford History of India, p. 332.

26. Dutt, p.10.

27. Moon, P.T., Imperialism and World Politics , New York, 1930,
p. 294.

28. Sunderland, p.135.

29. Lajpat Rai, p. 343.

30. Zimand, p. 46.

31. Kohn, p. 359.

32. Moon, p. 294.

33. Sunderland, p. 133.

34. Lajpat Rai, p. 333.

35. Dutt, p. 370.

36. Lajpat Rai, p. 311.

37. Dutt, p. 373.

38. Ibid., p. 373.

39. Encyclopedia Britannica, 14 th ed., vol. xii, p. 167 a.

40. Ibid., p. 167 b.

41. P. 167 c; Lajpat Rai, p. 462.

42. Sunderland, p. 424.

43. Encyc. Brit., vol. xii, p. 167 c.

44. Indian Year-Book, p.299.

45. Dutt, pp. 369. 371, ix.

46. Lajpat Rai, p. 354.

47. Sunderland, p. 15.

48. Ibid.

49. Lajpat Rai. P. 356.

50. Ibid., p. 362. This has been partly remedied by the income-

152

THE CASE FOR INDIA

tax, which does not affect the poor directly.

51. Sunderland, p. 369.

52. Lajpat Rai, pp. 344-7 ; Dutt, p. xiii; Moon, p. 291.

53. Encyc. Brit., vol. xii, p. 178.

54. Wood, p. 188.

55. Indian Year-Book , p. 28.

56. Lajpat Rai, p. 346.

57. Oxford History of India , p. 780; Moon, p. 300.

58. Indian Year-Book for 1828-9 .

59. Dutt, p. 423.

60. Ibid., p. 234.

61. Lajpat Rai, p. 395.

62. Sunderland, p. 311.

63. Ibid., pp. 308-9.

64. Ibid., p. 486.

65. Lajpat Rai, p. 481.

66. Sunderland, p. 305.

67. Ibid., p. 306.

68. Dutt, p. 321.

69. Ibid., p. 426.

70. Ibid., p. 414.

71. Op. cit., p. 90.

72. Sunderland, pp. 376 f.

73. Zimand, p. 184.

74. Sunderland, p. 482.

75. Ibid., p. 170.

76. Ibid., p. 467.

77. Zimand, p. 217.

78. Mayo, Katherine, Mother India, New York, 1928, p. 374.

79. Lajpat Rai, p. 355.

80. Indian Year-Book, p.29.

81. Zimand, pp. 180-1, 9-10, 178.

82. Lajpat Rai, p. 321.

83. Dutt, p. 256.

84. Ibid., pp. 45, 256-7, viii-ix.

NOTES

153

85. Ibid., p.263.

86. Martin, Montgomery, Eastern India, in Dutt, p. 290.

87. Zimand, p. 191.

88. Kohn, p. 101.

89. Lajpat Rai, p.382.

90. Ibid., p.462.

91. Sunderland, p. 365.

92. Digby, Prosperous India, p. 208, in Lajpat Rai, p. 333.

93. Dutt, p. 47.

94. Indian Year-Book, p. 791.

95. Lajpat Rai, p. 341.

96. Dutt, p. 50.

97. Lajpat Rai, p. 514.

98. Zimand, p. 193.

99. Lajpat Rai, p. 514.

100. Sunderland, p. 300.

101. Dutt, p. 49.

102. Adams, pp. 259-65; Sunderland, p. 386.

103. Adams, pp. 313 f.

104. Dutt, p. xiii.

105. Sunderland, p. 20; Lajpat Rai, pp. 341, 348.

106. Dutt, p. 409.

107. Ibid., p. 420.

108. Lajpat Rai, p. 357; Sunderland, p. 316.

109. Lajpat Rai, pp. 24-25.

110. Moon, p. 308; Sunderland, p. 259.

111. Indian Year-Book, p. 398.

112. Lajpat Rai, p.78.

113. Ibid., p. 55.

114. Sunderland, p. 283.

115. Lajpat Rai, p. 69.

116. Moon, p. 308.

117. Sunderland, p. 259.

118. Lajpat, Rai, p. 42.

119. Sunderland, p. 206.

154

THE CASE FOR INDIA

NOTES

155

120. Ibid., p. 160.

121. Ibid.

122. pp. 146, 156.

123. P. 149.

124. P. 150.

125. Lorenz, Round-the- World Traveller , New York, 1929, p. 207.

126. Sunderland, p. 155.

127. Ibid., pp. 149, 151.

128. P. 149.

129. Dutt, p.423.

130. Sir William Hunter, in Lajpat Rai, p. 284.

131. Lajpat Rai, p. 288.

132. Ibid., p. 353.

133. P. 366.

134. Indian Year-Book , p. 16.

135. Sunderland, p. 12; Dutt, p. vi.

136. E.g., Dr. C.C. Batchelder.

137. Dutt, pp. 51-2.

138. Ibid., p.7.

139. From an address to the Bar Association of New York, in
Lajpat Rai, p. 481.

140. Sunderland, p. 140; Zimand, p. 173 — the average for 1916-

25.

141. Mayo, p. 97.

142. Sunderland, p. 158; Zimand, p. 179.

143. Sunderland, pp. 140-1.

144. Lajpat Rai, p. 350.

CHAPTER II

1. Fulop-Miller, Rene, Lenin and Gandhi, London, 1927, p. 171.
Equally good is Josef Washington Hall, Eminent Asians, New
York, 1929. Of biographies I have found the best to be Gray
and Parekh, Mahatma Gandhi, Calcutta, 1928; Romain
Rolland's Mahatma Gandhi, New York, 1924, is a little vague

and airy. Two volumes by C.F. Andrews, one on the career
of Gandhi, the other on his ideas, are announced as this
book goes to press; they will be of great value, since
Andrews has been for twenty years an intimate friend of
Gandhi. An autobiography entitled Mahatma Gandhi : His
Own Story, has just appeared in England, and has aroused
much comment by its candor.

2. Fiilop-Miller, pp. 174-6.

3. Gandhi, Young India, 1924-26; New York, 1927, p.123.

4. Ibid., p. 133.

5. Fulop-Miller, p. 168.

6. Hall, p. 408.

7. Fiilop-Miller, pp. 202-3.

8. Ibid., p. 200.

9. Chirol, Sir Valentine, India, London, 1926, p. 213.

10. Gandhi, p. 309.

11. Fiilop-Miller, pp. 208-10.

12. Gandhi, p. 21.

13. Rolland, p. 7.

14. Hall, p. 396.

15. Gray and Parekh, p.6.

16. Ibid., p.7.

17. Hall, p.400; Rolland, p.40.

18. Hall, p 402; Rolland, p.ll.

19. Rolland, p.16.

20. Hall, p.16.

21. Fiilop-Miller, p. 267; Hall, p. 413.

22. Moon, Imperialism and World Politics , p. 290.

23. Fiilop-Miller, p.205.

24. Parmelee, M., Oriental and Occidental Culture, New York,
1928, p. 302; Gray and Parekh, p.27.

25. Gray and Parekh, p. 35.

26. Rolland, p.92.

27. Kohn, History of Nationalism in the East, p. 404.

28. Gray and Parekh, p. 64; Rolland, p. 90; Hall, p. 439.

156

THE CASE FOR INDIA

NOTES

157

29. Gandhi, p. 179.

30. Cf. Hall, p. 492; Gandhi, p. 13.

31. Gray and Parekh, p. 109.

32. Gandhi, p. 36.

33. Ibid.

34. Gandhi, p.69.

35. Rolland, p. 66.

36. In Fiilop-Miller, p. 259.

37. Gandhi, p. 887; Fiilop-Miller, p. 291; Hall, p.493.

38. Close, Upton (pseudonym for Josef Washington Hall), The
Revolt of Asia, New York, 1928, p. 47.

39. Gandhi, p. 279.

40. Hall, p. 480.

41. Hall, p. 440; Fulop-Miller, p. 281.

42. Mukerji, Dhan Gopal, Visit India with Me , New York, 1929,
p. 138.

43. Fulop-Miller, p. 299; Rolland, p. 220; Kohn, pp. 410-12.

44. Rolland, p. 224.

45. Fiilop-Miller, p. 177.

46. Zimand, Living India , p. 223.

47. Fiilop-Miller, p. 315.

48. Ibid., p. 186.

49. Gray and Parekh, p. 99.

50. Rolland, p. 69.

51. Fiilop-Miller, p.169.

52. Rolland, p. 140.

53. Gandhi, p. 29.

54. Ibid., p. 78.

55. Ibid., p.314.

56. Hall, p. 496.

57. Park, No Yong, Making a New China , Boston, 1929, p.293.

58. Gandhi, p. 721.

59. Gray and Parekh, p. 26.

60. Ibid., p. 29.

61. Rolland, p. 36.

62. Hall, p. 500.

63. Rolland, p. 36.

64. Fiilop-Miller, p. 244.

65. Gandhi, pp. 75, 183.

66. Ibid., p. 55.

67. Ibid., p.73.

68. Ibid., p. 58.

69. Gray and Parekh, p. 120.

70. Hall, p. 437.

71. Gandhi, p. 59.

72. Ibid., p.78

73. Ibid., p. 131.

74. Hall, p. 474.

75. Unity for August 18, 1930.

76. Hall, p. 502; Rolland, p. 46.

77. Zimand, p. 95.

78. Rolland, pp. 38, 48.

79. Ibid., pp. 137 f.

80. Gandhi, p. 60.

81. Rolland, p. 133.

82. Hall, p. 495.

83. Gandhi, p. 652; Rolland, p. 49.

84. Gandhi, p. 652.

85. Hall, p. 503; Rolland, p. 45.

86. Gandhi, p. 56.

87. Ibid., pp. 70,74.

88. Hall, p. 503; Gandhi, pp. 30, 70.

89. Gandhi, p. 79.

90. Fiilop-Miller, p. 237; Parmelee, p. 89; Kohn, pp. 401-2.

91. Fulop-Miller, p. 235.

92. Rolland, p. 51; Hall, p. 497.

93. Kohn, p. 413; Rolland, pp. 8, 114, 121; Hall, pp. 388, 495.
For Gandhi's treatment of sexual irregularity at his school,
cf. Gandhi, 125.

94. Fulop-Miller, p. 238; Gandhi, p. 720; Rolland, pp. 54-5; Gray

158

THE CASE FOR INDIA

NOTES

159

and Parekh, p. 29.

95. Hall, p. 506; Fiilop-Miller, p. 227.

96. Zimand, p. 220.

97. Fulop-Miller, p. 233. An Associated Press Dispatch of March
4, 1930, told how a band of men transporting machinery into
Tibet were set upon and massacred.

98. Fiilop-Miller, p. 233.

99. Joad, C. E. M., in The Listener, October 2, 1929.

100. Gandhi, p. 683.

101. Fulop-Miller, p. 242.

102. Ibid., p. 316.

103. Ibid., p. 220.

104. Zimand, p. 219.

105. Hall, p. 467.

106. Fiilop-Miller, pp. 171-2.

107. Kohn, pp. 103, 431; Mukerji, p. 208; Rolland, p. 112.

108. Besant, Mrs. Annie, India, Madras, 1923, p. 2; Kohn, p.9.

109. Gandhi, p. 59.

110. Rolland, p. 244.

111. Gray and Parekh, p. 92.

112. Fiilop-Miller, p. 301.

113. Ibid., p. 293.

114. Gandhi, p. 925.

115. Fulop-Miller, p. 251.

116. Gandhi, p. 940.

117. Ibid., p. 910.

118. Ibid., p. 28.

119. Rolland, p. 235.

120. Gray and Parekh, p. 85.

121. Gandhi, p. 225.

122. Ibid., p. 277.

123. Ibid., p. 376.

124. Ibid., p. 270.

125. Fiilop-Miller, p. 228.

126. Gandhi, p. 284.

127. Ibid., p. 226.

128. Ibid., p. 629.

129. Fiilop-Miller, p. 220.

130. Ibid., p.243.

131. Rolland, p. 170.

132. Gandhi, p. 887.

133. Ibid., pp. 61, 539.

134. Fiilop-Miller, p. 280.

135. Hall, p. 450; Gandhi, p. 241.

136. Rolland, p. 68.

137. Gandhi, pp. 869,2.

138. Fiilop-Miller, pp. 207, 162.

CHAPTER III

1. Kohn, p. 109.

3. Hall, p. 427; Fiilop-Miller, p. 272.

2. Ibid., p. 118.

4. Sunderland, p. 406.

5. Smith, V. A., Oxford History of India, p. 780; Lorenz, p. 420.

6. Hall, p. 426.

7. Lajpat Rai, p. 378; Wood, p. 188.

8. Sunderland, p. 435.

9. Oxford History of India, p. 593.

10. Sunderland, p. 289.

11. Hall, p. 479.

12. New York Times, September 10-11, 1930.

13. Sunderland, p. 488.

14. Ibid., p. 489.

15. Ibid .

16. Simon Report, London, 1930, vol. I, pp. 149-50.

17. Encylcopedia Britannica, 14 th ed., vol. xii, p. 167 a.

18. Sunderland, p. 427.

19. E.g., Simon Report, vol. I, p. 148.

20. Lajpat Rai, p. 407.

160

THE CASE FOR INDIA

NOTES

161

21. Ibid., p. 404; Sunderland, p. 231.

22. Sunderland, p. 423.

23. Ibid., p. 450.

24. Ibid., p. 451.

25. Gray and Parekh, p. 49.

26. Ibid., pp. 49-50.

27. Sunderland, p. 438.

28. Chirol, p. 208; Sunderland, p. 438.

29. Chirol, l.c.

30. Wood, p. 189, Chirol, p. 209.

31. Gray and Parekh, p. 114; Chirol, p. 209; Sunderland, p. 422.

32. Sunderland, p. 423.

33. Ibid., p. 444; Chirol, l.c.; Gray and Parekh, p. 116.

34. Sunderland, p. 448; Thompson, E. J., Rabindranath Tagore,
Calcutta, 1921, p. 55.

35. Simon Report, vol. I, p. 249.

36. Gandhi, pp. 183, 75; Zimand, p. 138; Wood, p. 375; Indian
Year-Book, p. 30.

37. Simon Report, vol. I, p. 27.

38. Ibid., p. 249; Lorenz, p. 326.

39. Hall, p. 450.

40. Rolland, p. 197

41. Lorenz, p. 324.

42. Kohn, p. 420.

43. Zimand, p. 255.

44. Naidu, Sarojini, The Sceptred Flute: Songs of India, New York,
1928, p. xi.

45. Simon Report, vol. ii, p. 91.

46. Ibid., p. 60.

47. Ibid., p. 36.

48. Ibid., p. 290.

49. Ibid., p. 18.

50. Ibid., p 21-3.

51. Ibid., pp. 175, 174.

52. Unity, Aug. 18, 1930, p. 347.

53. New York Evening Telegram, May 23, 1930; Unity, Aug. 18,
1930, p. 349.

54. Chicago Daily News, June 20 and 22, 1930; Unity, Aug. 18,
1930, p. 348.

55. Unity, Aug. 18, 1930, p. 348.

56. Ibid., p. 353.

57. Ibid., pp. 350-1.

CHAPTER IV

1. The best statement of the case for England in India is the
recent Simon Report, particularly Volume II. More interesting
is Sir Valentine Chirol's India, London, 1926. Entertaining
but unreliable is Katherine Mayo's Mother India — a brilliant
piece of propaganda not to be taken without an antidote.
The English histories of India, except those by Elphinstone
and Vincent Smith, are patriotic apologies.

2. In Lajpat Rai, p. 456.

3. Cf. Mother India, passim; Simon Report, vol. i, pp. 38, 52;
Lajpat Rai, p. 186; Lorenz, pp. 327, 405, 335; Parmelee, pp.
139 n, 117; Report of the Indian Central Committee, Calcutta,
1929, p. 383.

4. Chirol, pp. 169, 176; Smith, V. A., Akbar, the Great Mogul,
Oxford, 1919, p. 401.

5. Simon Report, vol. i, p. 19.

6. C.C. Batchelder, Saturday Review of Literature, May 24, 1930.

7. Simon Report, vol. i, p. 21.

8. Dubois, J. A., Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies,
Oxford, 1928, p. 305.

9. Besant, p. 25; Hall, p. 422.

10. Chirol, p. 176.

11. Zimand, p. 174; Moon, p. 291; Sir George Paish in Zimand,
p. 191.

12. Dickinson, G. L., An Essay on the Civilizations of India, China
and Japan, New York, 1926, pp. 18, 25.

162

THE CASE FOR INDIA

NOTES

163

13. In Fiilop-Miller, p. 243.

14. Kohn, p. 358.

15. Dutt, C. R., Economic History of India : the Victorian Age ,
London, 1903, p. 198.

16. Cf. AE's (George W. Russell's) suggestive preface to
Zimand.

17. Kohn, p. 122.

18. Prof. Rhys Davids considers the climate of the northern and
more populous half of India to be quite healthy; cf. Buddhist
India , New York, 1903, pp. 43-4.

19. Until 1885 the age of consent in England was thirteen; at
present it is fourteen. Lajpat Rai, p. 257. In twelve of the
United States the legal age of marriage for women is twelve
years. Zimmand, p. 108.

20. Mukerji, M. J., A Son of Mother India Answers , New York,
1927, p. 59; Sunderland, p. 499.

21. Mukerji, p. 27; Sunderland, p. 254.

22. Zimand, p. 101.

23. Hall, p. 505.

24. Wood, p. 46.

25. Lajpat Rai, p. Iviii.

26. Mukerji, p. 31.

27. Lajpat Rai, p. Iviii; Sunderland, p. 247.

28. For 1921; vol. i, p. 151, in Mukerji, p. 19.

29. Zimand, p. 117.

30. Wood, p. 33.

31. Mukerji, p. 51. Dr. M. I. Balfour of India gives 18.7 as the
average age of first maternity in the Bombay hospitals, and
19.4 in Madras hospitals. Cf. Lajpat Rai, p. 188; Sunderland,
p. 247.

32. Cf. Rabindranath Tagore in Keyserling, H., The Book of
Marriage , New York, 1926, p. 112.

33. Lajpat Rai, p. 192; Wood, p. 111.

34. Kohn, p. 425.

35. Wood, p. 117.

36. Prof. Sudhindra Bose, in the Nation (New York), June 19,
1929.

37. New York Times , June 16, 1930.

38. Mukerji, D. G., Visit India with Me, p. 209.

39. Sunderland, p. 204; "Upton Close," pp. 235, 176; Wood, p.
266; Mukerji, A Son of Mother India Answers , p. 38.

40. Cf. Report of the Indian Central Committee, p. 375.

41. Simon Report , vol. i, p. 395.

42. Zimand, p. 103.

43. Kohn, p. 427.

44. Mr. K. Natarajan, in Sunderland, p. 254.

45. Lajpat Rai, pp. Iviii, 191, 69.

46. Report of the Indian Central Committee , p. 375.

47. Sunderland, p. 204.

48. Lajpat Rai, p. 204; Indian Year Book for 1929, pp. 576-7; Wood,
p. 175.

49. In Sunderland, p. 257.

50. Besant, p. 50.

51. Dutt, op.cit., pp. 173-4.

52. Besant, p. 52.

53. Dutt, p. 529.

54. H. M. Hyndman in Wood, p. 412.

55. Wood, p. 396.

56. Dutt, p. 534.

57. Wood, p. 235.

58. Lorenz, p. 315.

59. Sunderland, p. 216.

60. Mukerji, Visit India with Me, p. 201.

61. Kohn, p. 349.

62. Wood, p. 361.

63. Gandhi, p. 73.

64. In Sunderland, p, 233.

65. Lajpat Rai, p. 409.

66. Zimand, p. 232; Lorenz, p. 322.

67. Sunderland, p. 117.

164

THE CASE FOR INDIA

68. Ibid., p. 121.

69. Ibid .

70. Ibid., p. 126.

71. P. 125.

72. P. 127.

73. Zimand, p. 51.

74. Sunderland, p. 211.

75. P. 334.

76. P. 332.

77. P . 339.

78. P. 327.

79. Mukerji, A Son of Mother India Answers, p. 44.

80. Simon Report, vol. ii, p. 54.

81. Preface to his Ramakrishna .

82. Gandhi, p. 436.

83. J.K. Turner in Sunderland, p. 394.

84. Kohn, p. 98.

85. Gandhi, pp. 863, 62.

86. Lajpat Rai, p. 425.

CONCLUSION

1. Kohn, p. 94.

2. Gandhi recognizes this last necessity; cf. Young India , p. 436.

3. Zimand, p. 228.

4. Dr. Stanley Jones in Gray and Parekh, p. 92.

5. Zimand, p. 18.

6. Ibid., p. 228. May I add, in this last word, that I should like
to see applied to Haiti and the Philippines the same
principles of Home Rule which have been here defended
in the case of India?